Rising Dawn
by CuChulainn X19
Summary: Nova Aiolos is a hardworking computer genius and prodigy of a one-man army. Willow Nox is the shy, mysterious type. Aurora Raines is Vacuo's two-time regional champion. And Nova's brother, Dillon... is honestly a pretty normal kid. Still, maybe together they can make a difference. Arkos.
1. Thunder Trailer

Thunder

It is early spring, early enough that it could just as easily be late fall. A teenage boy walks along a woodland path, stepping lightly over roots, stones, and dried-out creek beds. He wears black boots, khakis, and a gray vest with a navy-blue shirt and justaucorps, the jacket buttoned around his waist and folded down to create lapels. On his back, a white symbol stands out in relief: a hexagon with a lightning mark connecting its top and bottom vertices, interrupting lines that would connect the other four to the mark's center. His blond hair falls a little past his shoulders, and his brown eyes hide behind rectangular glasses.

He passes into a clearing, continuing along the path as the moon rises. He stops without warning, a short staff—perhaps two feet long—flashing into view in his right hand as a hooked blade snaps out of one end. The staff extends itself more than double, to four and a half feet, while the blade lengthens as well. The boy twirls the staff and points what would appear to be the weapon's pommel behind him, then pulls a hidden trigger.

A white-blue bolt flashes from the end of the staff and slams into an Ursa that had begun following its wielder. The Ursa bellows in pain and falls, dead, after the bolt explodes in a flash of lightning, gouging a sizable chunk in what is suddenly a fast-disintegrating corpse. More Grimm follow it out of the woods, Ursae and Beowolves, and the boy turns, sees them, and smirks.

Rounds flash from his weapon again and again, thinning the herd before the first Ursa reaches him. He backflips twice, out of the way, then dashes forward again, cutting hard across the beast in the blink of an eye. He turns his staff, pressing the barrel against the monster's stomach, and it is dust on the wind before it can growl.

The Beowolves advance next, charging forward in a group, and he leaps into the sky, gathering his Semblance. When he falls, it is with his staff held in his off hand, his right crackling with electricity. He strikes the ground in the middle of the pack, and the lesser Grimm explode into nothing. More rush toward him, but he collapses his staff, puts it away, and holds out his hands. Electricity leaps from his fingers, annihilating the Beowolves as they close in. More follow, and he strikes with his staff, spearing one with the hook of his staff before slashing left at a second and following through to blow away a third. He jumps high and lands with his blade in a Grimm's back before launching into a lightning-fast series of slashes, blasts, and stabs, concluding with a thrust through the neck of a rearing monster. At last, only one remains; two more Ursae lumber just behind the trees.

He pauses for a moment, assessing the situation, and charges. This Beowolf must have been the leader of its pack; it dodges his first strike with uncanny agility and apparent foresight. He fires his staff behind him to knock the creature off balance even as he turns, the blade of his weapon lopping off an overextended paw. He darts forward again, cutting low, and the monster is down to two limbs; before it hits the ground, he has reversed direction and blasted it to smoke.

The remaining Ursae move out of the trees, and he wonders how such stupid creatures have reached the size that these have. In a moment, however, he darts forward, holding his staff almost like a sword, and cuts the first Grimm with a hurricane of slashes against its thick-furred chest, forcing it back without allowing it to retaliate. Then he jumps, planting both feet and the butt of his spear against the monster's stomach, and fires as he falls off and rolls away.

The final Ursa is enraged by its partner's death, and, charging, it directs a crushing swipe at the boy before he can regain his feet. Undeterred, he plants his blade firmly in the ground, and the enormous paw shakes the weapon as the monster scores a direct hit on the mouth of the barrel—immediately before it recoils, abruptly minus one arm. It swings again with its other arm, and the boy again leaps into the air, the time landing on the creature's back, his blade lodged just behind the armor on its face. Acting quickly, he withdraws the blade and presses the gun end of the spear to the wound, pulling the trigger and using the recoil to gain additional distance from the monster as its death spasms send him flying.

He lands upright, his blade digging a furrow along the path as he uses it to slow himself down. He nods to himself as he collapses his staff and puts it away, then draws a torch and, with a momentary crackle of electricity, sets it ablaze. He walks on.

* * *

So, here it is at last. My fourth story, but whatever. The self-insert fanfiction. Darn it, it's a fun scenario to think about, and I'm still salty over V3E12. There's a whole new team coming, and I'm going to try to avoid the more godawful tendencies of the self-insert genre, but all in all it's going to be a fun and potentially painful romp through Monty's wonderful playground.

And having just said I'm going to try to do something actually clever, let me now turn around and say that the inspirations for this character (he has a name, as does his weapon) are _Red vs Blue_ 's Agent Washington and _Destiny_ 's arc-based subclasses. Like I said, I'm doing this for me. (Please do note that Nora's Semblance is based on absorbing electricity, whereas this involves projecting it.)


	2. Aurora Trailer

Southern Lights

* * *

We seek victory by instinct, but it is in defeat that our most valuable lessons are learned.

* * *

"Ladies and gentlemen," the announcer's voice echoes across the stadium, "the final round. Ignis Pistris versus Aurora Raines."

The stadium is blindingly bright, although the massive, clear dome overhead allows the air conditioning system to keep out the worst of the Vacuo heat. The final combatants in the Vacuo Regional Tournament step forward and shake hands. One, a tall, musclebound male, is, for whatever reason, wearing almost all black: his boots, pants, and sweater—who wears a sweater like that in Vacuo?—are all black, and his torso is further protected by incredibly bulky red armor that covers his chest, back, and shoulders; his gauntlets appear to be his weapons. His eyes are red and his black hair is shorn extremely close. His opponent, a tall-but-not-as-tall, slenderly athletic girl, wears her pale blonde hair in a ponytail a third of the way down her back; her green eyes blink violet momentarily as she settles into a fighting stance. She wears black boots and magenta pants, a blue-green tank top, and a teal jacket with ceremonial military styling and a tripartite triangle, point-down, on each shoulder.

The starting horn sounds, and the girl throws up a dome of glittering, translucent, golden panes as the boy unleashes the flamethrowers built into his gauntlets, her eyes turning violet while she holds the shield. She jumps high, the dome shattering behind her, and draws a pair of machine pistols as she arcs over her opponent's head. He suffers very minor Aura loss before readjusting his aim to burn away her bullets, and her shield comes back to life as she lands again on his other side.

Seeming to attempt the same tactic, she jumps again, but instead forms her shield tightly around her opponent, who suffers slightly worse damage this time as his flames whirl around inside the confined space before flickering out. She charges, keeping the shield up to prevent him from firing until the last moment, when it shatters and she executes a perfect flying kick to the boy's face. He gets up quickly, though, and she's hard-pressed to stay close enough and move fast enough to both avoid his fists and prevent him from using his flamethrowers.

Eventually, she hits his face with a jab, then gets a grip on his arm that allows her to spin him around and double him over for an axe kick. He hits the deck, but his aura is still fairly full, so she has a hook kick-roundhouse combination ready as he gets to his feet. She spins and tries to land a side kick, but he catches her foot, yanks her off the ground with a spin, and throws her across the arena.

"It's gonna take more than a little pain to put me down, girlie," he taunts as she hauls herself up. Flamethrowers apparently forgotten, he responds to her silent charge in kind, leaping through the air to grapple—only for her to hit the floor and slide under him, the wink of a purple eye his only warning before he slams into one of her infernal shields and falls to the ground again, Aura lowered that much further.

This time, he stands up to receive a blow to the face from a quarterstaff, and he flinches at the electric shock that comes with it. He blocks and punches desperately, but he's stuck with hand-to-hand while she has a melée weapon, and the fight is correspondingly uneven. A blow to the back of his leg sends him to one knee, and she steps up on that knee to deliver an excruciating kick to his face.

She gives him space to stand up this time, but by this point that feels more insulting than sportsmanlike. He smashes a fist toward the center of her staff and it breaks in two, but that's her fault, and suddenly she's using batons. One collides with his temple, he feels himself spin around, and she's executed a perfect suplex by the time he realizes she's grabbed him. As he makes his way to his knees, she stuns him with an elbow and uses a full-body rotation to smash a fist into his face. He stands up one last time, only a sliver of Aura remaining now, and sees her weapon back in quarterstaff form, leveled at him like a javelin.

There's a blue glow gathering at the back end of the weapon, and between the transformations he knows the thing to be capable of and his smirking opponent's stance, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what's about to happen.

"Oh, son of a—"

The obscenity, audible only to the two combatants, is cut off as the girl launches her staff and strikes her last opponent square in the forehead. The weapon fires into his face on impact and bounces back to her hand as he flies across the arena and collapses, Aura well into the elimination zone.

"And Aurora Raines is the champion of the Vacuo Regional Tournament for the second year in a row! That's all, folks, and we'll be back next year with a whole new crop of fighters."

* * *

OC number two! The weather-theme trailer titles thing didn't end up working as well as I hoped (it gets worse, too), but I have no better ideas. Aurora's color scheme, while reflective of her name, also vaguely echoes the Dakota twins (from whom she gets her Semblance) and Agent Carolina (with whom she's have other parallels) of _RvB_. I lost my notes for this chapter when I tried to fix some inconsistencies in Aurora's appearance, so that's all.


	3. Dusk Trailer

Dusk

* * *

I have learned to be valiant. I will not now abandon my being.

* * *

A teenage girl sits on a tree branch, sharpening a hatchet. Her hair and eyes are dark brown, her hair nearly black, and her clothes—boots, pants, blouse, and jacket—are completely black. She pulls out a second axe, a twin to the first, and uses both to grip the tree as she swings to the ground at the sound of approaching feet.

"Tiwaz," she greets. Her tone is somber, although with a hint of eagerness. "Ready to go?"

The newcomer—Tiwaz—laughs in affirmation. His brown hair is short and matched by a bushy, well-trimmed moustache; he wears black boots, like her, but his pants and jacket are white, his shirt a black button-down, and a white scarf is wrapped around his neck. A long-handled, single-bladed axe is slung across his back.

"When have I not been?" he replies, cheerfully. "Come on, then, it's not far to go, assuming they don't yet know we're coming."

She nods and stows her weapons, and the two of them begin walking. It's late autumn, so moving silently is somewhat difficult, but they move quickly and lightly enough that any noise they cause is indistinguishable from the wind.

They come to a small bluff that overlooks a clearing, at the base of which a camp is nestled. They nod to each other; the air shimmers around the girl, and she disappears. Tiwaz jumps. He lands behind a pair of sentries in unadorned masks of the White Fang, their backs to a small, covered cave in the hillside.

"Knock, knock, chaps!" He laughs quietly as he slams their heads together with enough force to drop them both instantly. He sprints ahead, but catches the eye of another mook, and five men with guns pin him behind a tree. He ducks out from his cover, catching one in the groin (he goes down instantly) and knocking the gun from another's hand.

The other three focus fire on him, and he rolls behind a rock, but the girl descends from nowhere, wrapping her arm around one gunman's neck and directing his fire into his brethren. The terrorist whose gun Tiwaz shot picks up another rifle and aims it, but the girl embeds one of her axes in the weapon, then uses her other axe to strike him in the gut and finish him with a point-blank shot to the face.

Of course, the firefight has attracted attention, and now they're surrounded by four dozen more White Fang, about half with swords and half with rifles.

"Well, I think I could take about a dozen of them," Tiwaz quips, shouldering his weapon, as a masked woman with antlers and a pair of red-bladed revolvers walks up. Her right antler has only five prongs; her left one has six.

"Keep them in front of me, boys," she instructs the White Fang, who shift and continue pointing their weapons at the duo. Turning to the invaders, she continues, "Well, this is a surprise. Tiwaz Waite and Willow Nox. I know why you're here," she point to the girl, Willow, "but you, Tiwaz? I thought we had something."

"You worked for her?" Willow is obviously angry at her partner.

"A contract's a contract, dear," Tiwaz replies, apparently to both of them. "And sorry for you, Vera, but I always get my man."

Before the faunus woman can retort that she is not, in fact, a man, Tiwaz pulls out his Scroll and presses a button. A thunderous boom in the distance draws eyes, and when everyone looks back, Willow is gone. Moments later, two riflemen crash against each other and fall to the ground, and a third follows them as Willow's invisibility flickers just enough to show that the flat of an axe to the temple is the reason why.

"You idiots, what did I say?" Vera yells at her troops as Tiwaz takes the opportunity to backflip between a pair of sword-armed thugs and knock their heads together. "I said keep them in front of me!"

Tiwaz rolls again as Vera takes aim at him, then sweeps a grunt off his feet while collapsing the handle of his longaxe, which allows him to blast the defeated fighter through the air, right into Vera's face. He takes advantage of the interlude to re-extend the handle and hammer another soldier with the bladeless side of the gun's stock, then execute a three-sixty spin and do the same to another advancing swordsman.

Willow, meanwhile, appears between two riflemen, charging the one just long enough for both to open fire before she disappears. The gunman she had charged toward is abruptly thrown through the air to collide with his fellow, followed shortly by a loose axehead, which embeds itself in a tree behind the fallen soldiers. Willow flies after it, pulled by a retracting cable, and lands at the tree, where she frees her thrown axe and fires both weapons at the recovering grunts. She ducks the swing of a swordsman, axing him in the gut before striking a blunt blow to the back of his head. Two more charge, and she rolls away from one and toward the other, whom she side-kicks into a backswing from Tiwaz, before turning and catching the first with a shotgun blast to the face.

Twin explosions signal that Vera has made her way out from the pile of thrown bodies, and Willow and Tiwaz turn to focus on the only other conscious person in the camp. "Tiwaz," she orders, "stand down. We can discuss this."

"Not a chance, my dear," he replies, settling into a firing stance with his axe fully extended and aimed at her.

"Very well, then." She takes up a dueling stance, only to glance to her left and realize she's messed up for the second time. "Wait, where'd that blasted girl—"

A squelching thunk and a shotgun report echo around the clearing, and Willow stands behind the fallen terrorist, one axe raised. She bends to retrieve its partner, and tells Tiwaz, "She's alive, if it matters to you. Do you know where it is?"

He nods. "Honestly, it would probably have simplified things if you'd killed her. Best not to get used to it too early, though, I suppose. And it's most likely back in the cave. This way.."

The walk past the fallen insurrectionists to the bluff they'd descended earlier. Tiwaz pushes aside the tarp over the cave entrance, and they duck inside.

There, at the end of the short tunnel, lies the sword. It is wrapped in black cloth that cannot quite conceal its glow, and is propped against the cave wall. Willow runs to it, loosing it from its cover, and holds it up in admiration. "Anglachel. We did it, Dad," she whispers.

"Sadly," Tiwaz says behind her, "I'm going to have to take that."

"What?" She turns to face him, disbelieving.

"We have to win the war, my dear. Don't worry, James will make sure you get home safely."

The back side of his axe swings toward her face, and everything goes black.

* * *

It's always the British ones. Obviously, Tiwaz is based on Agent Wyoming; perhaps a little less obviously, Willow is based mildly on CT, although alignment considerations have been moved around and she has Tex-like invisibility, not CT's clones, which Blake already has. Don't worry, you all know James already.


	4. Nova Trailer

Nova

* * *

We are the light that scatters the dark and leaves no shadows, and we will burn until nothing remains.

* * *

A deep voice, menacing in the way that comes effortlessly to bureaucrats delivering mundane announcements, echoes over a scratchy microphone: "Nova Aiolos."

A teenager, tall and powerful for his age, rises from the bench of a deserted locker room. He wears black combat boots, tan pants, and a black t-shirt, over which he has fastened a red, samurai-style, kilted cuirass and gauntlets with black-and-gold shoulders. His brown hair is fastened in a short ponytail, while a pair of glasses rest across his nose. He picks up a sword from the bench, beside him, and places it across his back; it is thick and sharply curved, with a secondary grip carved out of the blade not far from the hilt, although it appears short for its long handle, and the five-pointed outline of an adenium blossom is etched at the base of the blade.

He walks out the door labeled "ARENA ENTRANCE." On the other side waits a wide, round room with two-story walls—he doesn't look behind him to see the window from which the Beacon examiners and his family are watching—and a vaulted ceiling. He settles into a ready stance, wondering what they'll give him.

Mechanical bodies march out through the other four doors of the arena. Knockoff Atlesian AN-120s. There are a lot, maybe two dozen, but he can handle them. He blurs forward, smashing a fist into one of the lead androids, and leaps into the air. At the apex of his jump, he draws his sword, which unfolds to twice its storage length, before crashing down.

His sword catches fire as he descends, and the shockwave when he lands splinters the floor and fries the remaining five robots in the group he'd attacked. Reversing his grip on his sword, he looses a volley of explosive Dust rounds at the next nearest group of enemies before rolling forward to avoid the fire of the remaining groups. He comes up where the group he'd fired on had once stood and decapitates the last two robots with a single swing, then turns to the opposite group and slams his sword into the ground again.

This time, a trail of fire streaks along the floor and explodes in their midst, and he leaps toward the last cluster of androids, slashing quickly and destructively as he moves to avoid their bullets. Moments later, all is still, and he places his sword, folded again, on his back.

The test is not over, however, and he dives out of the center in time to avoid being crushed by what is essentially a massively oversized rocket locker. The enormous projectile unfolds itself as he watches, transforming into a segmented, eight-legged tank. The tank then proceeds to curl around itself and charge him like an extra-large, mechanical Boarbatusk.

The size makes it easier, actually. With his hands unencumbered by his sword, he grabs the leading claws of the machine, stopping it in its tracks, although it manages to push him back a few feet with the force of its momentum. It can't bend to reach the ground, though, so he rips off the front claws and kicks it in its mechanical belly, knocking it across the arena.

It reconfigures itself as it stands up, sprouting a heavy turret that proves mercifully slow-moving as he races counterclockwise around the arena. He steps up on the wall and pushes off, and the turret swivels helplessly while he soars above its firing arc, drawing his sword in a reverse grip and blasting apart the chaingun with a series of explosive rounds.

When he lands, of course, it's with a front-row seat to the machine's new energy cannon, and he's knocked back several feet across the arena by the force of the blow, despite managing to catch it perfectly on his blazing sword. Once the volley ends, he turns to run clockwise around the robot, but somehow the thing itself can now turn faster than its turret could, and with all his running, jumping, and rolling, he can barely stay ahead of its blasts.

So he doesn't. It's stopped firing beams at him now, so he turns and catches a blast full on his blade, firing into the ground as he does so. Before the smoke can clear, he hurls the sword toward where he remembers its cannon being, and is rewarded seconds later with the sight of the mechanical beast thrashing around, its main weapon—and probably a lot of its other systems—torn to pieces. He charges, grabbing hold of his sword and yanking it out as he vaults over the machine.

He lands, turns, and jumps high, his sword blazing like a thousand suns as he streaks down toward the combat machine. His blade eats through it as if it were cutting through fog, its front end lodging deep in the arena floor, and the machine passes away, reduced to fading embers around him.

The locker room doors slide open again, and the voice over the microphone instructs him to retrieve his belongings and await a decision shortly. No sooner have the arena doors closed behind him than the exit doors slam open and another boy races in, long hair and unbuttoned justaucorps flapping around him as he flings his arms around the taller Nova.

"Nova, that was amazing! The punch and the explosions and the machine, man that was incredible! There's no way they'll turn you down now! We can go to The Complex Pan to celebrate, yeah?"

Nova laughs and pats his brother's back. "Sure, Dillon. Sounds good."

He disengages from the hug and heads for the door. "This means Atlas is out, right?" he asks, grinning.

Dillon returns his grin and shrugs. "Meh. Flynt'll be disappointed, but as long as I'm with my baby brother, it's all cool."

* * *

And the gang's all here! Well, not yet, technically, but at least now they're all color images instead of silhouettes. Nova is based on Agent Maine/the Meta, with his abilities (although the fire could be interpreted as a reference to Sigma) based on the Sunsinger and Sunbreaker subclasses from _Destiny_. Go play it, it's a great game. His Semblance also works a little bit differently from Yang's: we didn't see it in action here, but he can give himself a temporary armor/attack buff with a recovery buff for his nearby allies, at the cost of Aura depletion and tiredness when he stops using it. I'll use it explicitly some time, it'll be fun. And painful.

Plus, we know Dillon's name, too, now! I hope no one sends these two to track down Penny, that could end badly.

The Complex Pan, by the way, is a nod to The Simple Wok, where Sun and Neptune have noodles after being thrown from the freeway in Volume 2. The flower on Nova's sword is, more specifically, an adenium obesum flower.

Next up, the shining Beacon! I have to admit I'm a little sad at the scenes I ended up cutting, but I couldn't fit Nova into the backstory structure that way and I decided not to have Dillon know a bunch of crazy stuff before the series even begins.

Finally, chapter length. I normally like to write shorter chapters, but working on this fic I have discovered some of the joy of writing longer, less single-minded chapters. To that end, updates on this fic will take longer, but should generally be about the length of all four trailers put together—five to six pages of Arial 10 in Google Docs. Adventure is out there!


	5. The Shining Beacon

1\. The Shining Beacon

* * *

Knowledge and action applied together will transform the humblest steel into a fearsome blade. —Song of Xanthe

* * *

Finally, they were on their way to Beacon. The first half of the day had passed in a haze of hugs and final checks of packed clothing, toiletries, combat equipment, and personal effects, and now Dillon and Nova had boarded the airship, alongside dozens of their fellow first-years.

Nova had his Scroll out and was working on some sort of auto-recombinant V.I. program, sitting on the floor with his back against a bulkhead. Dillon stood next to him, gazing out the window with a travel mug of hazelnut coffee in his hands. The view was certainly something, although the clear weather felt a little out of place, considering the momentous importance of the journey they had just begun. Well, you couldn't have thunderheads every day—even Dillon Aiolos, self-professed Thunderlord, would eventually get dragged down under those conditions—but surely today. Can't win them all, he supposed, and he turned to survey the spacious passenger compartment when a familiar visage caught his eye.

"Yang? Is that you?"

The girl turned around, her violet eyes widening in happy surprise.

"Nova! Dillon! Hey, guys, how've you been? Long time, no see, huh?"

Nova grunted assent, not moving from his place on the floor, while Dillon nodded and shrugged.

"Definitely been a while, yeah," the older boy agreed. "A lot of your friends from Signal here?"

"One or two," the brawler said, grinning mischievously. "How about you? I don't see anyone I remember from your brigade around here."

Dillon grinned back. "Nah, it's just me and Nova from Fort Point. Not many people from there went on to any of the academies. We were all always just a bunch of hippies, anyways. Flynt's gone to Atlas, though, I think there was some sort of financial trouble or something? He didn't say exactly. He almost persuaded me to follow him, actually, but then Nova got offered a spot, too, and there was no way we were turning that down. Wait—is that Ruby over there?"

Yang's grin grew even wider, and adopted a definite attitude of pride. "Yep! My baby sis got offered a spot at Beacon two years early! I guess something like that happened with Nova, too, huh?"

"I'd been working on it," Nova rumbled.

Dillon hauled his brother up and threw an arm around his shoulder. Nova gave him a brief one-armed hug back before wandering off as Dillon explained. "He'd done a lot of extra work, especially on fighting and weapons—not to mention all the crazy stuff he does with Scroll programming that I do not understand a word of—and, honestly, he was just getting too strong for anyone to keep up with him. He's been making up the academics since the year ended, but ninety percent of what really matters at a place like Beacon is combat effectiveness, so there wasn't really any reason for him not to apply early."

"Awesome," Yang said. "Hey, Ruby's looking a little lost over there, so I'm gonna go hang out with her for a bit. See you around, yeah? We'll have to hang out some time."

"See you around, yeah," Dillon echoed as the brawler walked off. Hm, who else could he talk to around here? An orange-haired girl was harassing her green-jacketed, dark-haired friend, who looked dead on his feet, although he also carried himself as though he were used to being that way. No, green probably didn't need another person to deal with, and orange was probably someone he couldn't deal with, himself. There was a goth girl wearing a bow, who looked even less interested in company than green-jacket, however interesting her literary tastes. There was—wait, was that Pyrrha Nikos? Ok, he was definitely not going over there, the girl would either be unbearable or hoping desperately not to be recognized. Good luck there, Miss Invincible Girl.

Someone poked him.

There was no one there.

Someone poked him again.

Pulsing his Semblance slightly, he reached out in what looked like a random direction and caught an arm. The air shimmered, and a dark-haired girl in more black than the moody girl appeared in front of him.

"Ow," she said. "Hey."

"Uh, hi. Why were you poking me?" She shrugged.

"I don't know. You looked interesting?" Well, he could accept that, probably.

"Well, okay. Uh, hi. Again. Sorry. I'm Dillon Aiolos. Who are you?" Ok, that was painful. Not completely atypical, though, and at least he probably couldn't get worse. He immediately wished he had a piece of wood to knock on.

"Hi. I'm Willow. Willow Nox. I'm from Troas—that's a settlement north of Vale. Do you know anyone here?" He had to laugh a little at her awkward, friendly barrage. At least he probably couldn't have picked a better person to screw up in front of.

"I'm from Vale—the city proper. I'm here with my brother, and I used to kind of know that girl with the long hair over there, but it's a pretty wide-open world for me. Do you know anyone?"

"No," she said, shaking her head. "I was kind of on my own for a while—well, not completely on my own, but stuff happened, and I didn't really know a lot of people my age ever—but yeah, I was really lucky to even get a chance to apply to Beacon, so I'm kind of alone now."

"I think a lot of people are in your shoes in that regard. There are the lower combat schools, of course, but Beacon takes people from all over, just like the other academies. One of the only friends from my old school who's actually training as a Huntsman is going to Atlas. Besides, we form teams the first day there, or at least that's what Mom and Dad said. Are... you okay?"

Willow had taken on a somber expression when he mentioned his parents, but she brushed it off quickly when she noticed his concern. "Yeah, I'm fine. So, do you have anything you like to do outside of fighting? I like to draw, and invent oral poetry. I dunno."

"That's pretty cool," Dillon said, adopting a stance similar to ones he'd seen Flynt take when expressing interest in something. "I'm better at writing than at speaking, and I can't really draw, but that's definitely cool. I do sing a little, though, and I play tin whistle." Rudimentary musical skill was commonplace among itinerant Huntsmen and Huntresses, at least those who preferred the favor of villages they passed through to the villagers' fear and the slow insanity of silent nights in the Wilds. Some Huntsmen, like Flynt, even went so far as to make music a physical weapon against the Grimm.

They ended up talking about the Mistralian and Valean poetic traditions and the reconstructed oral traditions that informed them, and then the philosophical implications woven throughout those traditions and the values of Hunting culture, until Professor Goodwitch came on to inform them of their approach to Beacon.

"So, I should probably go find my brother," DIllon said, feeling slightly awkward again. "I guess I'll, uh, see you around then, yeah? Best of luck with your teammates, and all that."

"Yeah, see you," Willow said as he turned away. "Good luck!"

* * *

Nova closed out his V.I. program and opened a Dustforge game on his Scroll. He needed to finish building the obsidian tower in his citadel, and he wasn't feeling particularly talkative. He was putting the finishing touches on a contraption to immolate anything that approached the city without ringing the doorbell when the babble of people making acquaintances cut off abruptly. He glanced up from his Scroll and saw a hologram of stern-looking woman, who quickly introduced herself as Glynda Goodwitch and began spouting what were honestly fairly inane platitudes. He refocused on his game, placing a few final blocks as Goodwitch finished talking, before putting it away and heading back over to where Dillon stood by the window.

The view was certainly something. His real camera was in his luggage, but he took out his Scroll again and took a few shots of Beacon and the cliffs that surrounded Vale, including one in which he managed to get Dillon and Beacon's central spire on either side of the image.

The peace was broken when a blond kid in a hoodie and light armor stumbled past, barely holding back a retch. Moments later, Yang said something about "Vomit Boy," and she and her sister—it had been Ruby, right?—started shrieking in disgust. Well, vomit was definitely disgusting, and presumably those two didn't live with a pair of cats who had no self-control.

The armored kid made it to a bathroom down the hall and locks himself in for the duration of the flight. When they landed, Nova and Dillon processed together to the gangway, discreetly shoving their way through the crowd of fellow first-years. Well, as subtly as two people could shove their way through a crowd when one of them stood six foot four. Regardless, their middle-of-the-pack status meant that they ended up being pretty much carried along to the auditorium, where the mob's

momentum subsided and kids grouped up and resumed their conversations from before, or else started new ones.

It seemed like starting a new conversation was the order of the day, as an orange-haired girl dashed up, dragging a black-haired boy in a green tailcoat, the former short but bouncy and the latter tired and not quite as tall as Dillon.

"Hi, I'm Nora!" the girl began. "And this is Ren! We've been friends forever, so it's really cool that we were able to go to Beacon together. Well, not together-together. Not that you're not handsome, Ren—" her friend appears utterly unperturbed by all of this, somehow, unless he simply lives in the same state of befuddlement that Nova's experiencing right now—"but that would be weird, right? Right. So, anyway, I'm Nora, and this is Ren, and it's just so amazing to finally be here, and what do you think, because I think we should all be friends, right, Ren?"

"Hello," the boy—Ren—said to Nova and Dillon. "I'm sorry about Nora. She can be… enthusiastic, sometimes."

Nova got the sense that "sometimes" really meant "she's like this every moment of every day and it's slowly killing me," but he simply held out his hand and introduced himself.

"Nova Aiolos."

Dillon followed suit, still looking askance at Nora, who wasn't quite bouncing around them, but nonetheless carried a very obvious energy even when she was trying to hold still.

"Dillon Aiolos, Nova's older brother. We're about a year and a half apart, he was just awesome enough in combat school that he was able to come here a year early."

Nova wished that his brother would stop telling everyone that, but he supposed that they were clearly brothers, and at least the friends they made would eventually learn that they weren't twins. Plus, it may have been unconventional, but he did earn his spot. Nora calmed down and began relating her and Ren's colorful history, with occasional corrections from her friend, when a scuffle a few groups over caught his attention.

It looked like Ruby and Yang were having an argument with—oh, Dust, was that the Schnee girl? Ice, or something? He and Dillon hadn't known at the time just what sort of crooked practices the Schnee Dust Company was mixed up in, but they had definitely been pleased that Dad had declined that particular business offer. It didn't stop him from working with Atlas, but General Ironwood was at least not quite as bad as Stark Schnee, and he had no obnoxious kids for the Aiolos siblings to be stuck in a room with for hours on end.

The Schnee scuffle and Nora's excited exposition cut off together as a gray-haired man in all green approached the microphone on the stage. Headmaster Ozpin needed no introduction, and he took none.

"I'll… keep this brief," he began, pushing his glasses up his nose. "You have traveled here today in search of knowledge, to hone your craft and acquire new skills. And when you have finished, you plan to dedicate your life to the protection of the people. But I look amongst you, and all I see is wasted energy, in need of purpose – direction. You assume knowledge will free you of this, but your time at this school will prove that knowledge can only carry you so far. It is up to you to take the first step."

Nova frowned. He thought that improving one's skills in order to protect the people was a perfectly reasonable purpose to have for oneself in life. If that was insufficient, what was Ozpin expecting them to find in themselves? Was it simply a challenge? He caught a similar expression on his brother's face before Goodwitch stepped up to the microphone herself, her saccharine tones from the airship now sharp and to the point.

"I wonder what that was about?" Dillon asked after Goodwitch had departed.

"I'm not sure," Ren said. "He seemed to be saying that there's something missing in us. Almost like a challenge."

Dillon nodded. "That's what I thought. A challenge… or a warning."

"A warning? A warning about what?" Nora broke in, apparently oblivious to the implications of the headmaster's speech.

"I don't know," Nova shook his head. "But I think that they think that something's coming. Remember what Goodwitch said on the airship, about our living in a time of remarkable peace? Why would you place so much emphasis and pressure on armed peacekeepers unless you think the peace isn't going to last?"

"The Grimm, for one," Ren noted.

"Well, sure," said Dillon, "but I'm pretty sure having fought Grimm is a requirement to get in here or something. We're here to learn, to get better, to do exactly what Professor Ozpin said wasn't enough." He looked down. "I don't know. I guess we'll all find out sooner or later."

The party nodded in agreement, and Nova decided to break the more immediate bad news. "Dillon, guess who else is here?"

Worried slightly by his brother's tone, Dillon asked, "Who?"

"Weiss Schnee."

Dillon facepalmed. "Are you kidding me? That's why I didn't want to go to Atlas!"

"And also me." Nova shoved his brother jokingly.

"Well, more that. I'd forgotten about her before now, honestly. And Beacon's better than Atlas, anyway. But why'd she have to come here?"

"Who's she?" Ren asked, at the same time as Nova suggested, "Well, she could have gotten better."

Dillon turned to Ren first. "She is Weiss Schnee, heiress to the Schnee Dust Company. We met her when she and I were nine and Nova was seven, while Mom and Dad were talking with her father about some joint research effort the SDC wanted Dad to get involved with—he's a scientist, and he'd done some work on Dust-Aura interactions that Atlas was interested in for some reason. Dad said no, of course, but we still had to spend hours sitting in a room with the most uptight nine-year-old kid to ever walk on Remnant. And Nova, do you really think she has?"

Nova raised an eyebrow, but conceded his brother's point. "Probably not, no. It looked like she was waving a flyer in Ruby's face before."

Dillon laughed flatly. "I can't wait to hear what that was about," he muttered.

Nora had grown tired of the discussion and was pressing Ren to take her sightseeing around campus before they had to reconvene in the ballroom. Dillon caught Ren's eye and nodded. Then Nora led Ren off and Dillon persuaded Nova to follow on the grounds that he might be able to get some good photos of the campus architecture and views before the older students showed up and there would be people everywhere at all hours.

* * *

The ballroom was, like the rest of Beacon, vast, beautiful, crowded, and empty. Willow unrolled her sleeping bag, wishing that she could extend her Semblance a bit farther than she actually could.

"Hey. Is this spot taken?"

Willow nearly performed a backflip as she spun around to see who had spoken to her. It was a tall, fair-haired girl in black pajama pants and a blue-green tank top, her own sleeping bag and pillow balanced neatly under arms.

"Um… no, I guess not. I'm, uh, I'm Willow. Willow Nox," she introduced herself, not entirely sure how to react now that she'd been not only noticed but spoken to twice in one day. Even with both of them in their pajamas, the new girl projected a sense of ability that made Willow fairly certain that one of them we leagues ahead of the other, and the leader wasn't her.

"Aurora Raines. Nice to meet you."

Aurora laid her sleeping bag and pillow parallel to Willow's and sat down with her back against the wall, then took out a book and started reading.

" _The Third Crusade_?" Willow asked, twisting around to read the cover. "What's it about?"

"The Faunus War," Aurora replied, looking up. "More or less. It's a fictionalized account, considered by some to be inspirational for the direction the White Fang has taken in recent years. Personally, I think it's well-written enough that there's more to be gained from it than a manifesto of violence. Diamond Pearse's character in particular is fleshed out in an interesting way—lion faunus," she explained in response to Willow's questioning eyebrow. "He led the initial rising and was one of the important leaders in the peace that was negotiated, although his own lust for power and subsequent assassination helped ensure things didn't turn out as well as they could have in the end."

Willow nodded. "Sounds interesting. I don't know much about the history of the White Fang, but I have had a few run-ins with their renovated operation. For a feared terror group, they don't give most of their operatives very good training."

"You've fought them?!" Aurora kept her voice down, but the shock was evident in her voice.

"A couple times, yeah. They… well, there was an attack on my village, and they took something important. I was one of the people who went to get it back."

"Huh. Did you? Get it back, I mean? And what was it, anyways?"

"It's… what it was isn't really important," Willow lied. Well, it wasn't a complete lie; Anglachel was very important to a lot of people, but it wasn't important here and now, which was what she'd really meant. "We found it eventually, yeah, but… we found it. That was an interesting day. It's how I ended up here, too, but that's a long story and I kind of wanted to get some sleep before Initiation."

A burst of laughter from the middle of the room distracted her. Glancing over, she saw Dillon, now wearing dark blue and grey pajamas, standing with two boys—one frankly a giant, the other slight, still wearing his combat outfit, and looking fit to keel over—and a short girl who wore what could only be described as pink. Lots of pink, even though she wasn't actually wearing that much. The girl had been the source of most of the laughter, although Dillon and the tall boy seemed to have found whatever it was funny as well.

Aurora had gone back to reading, and didn't look particularly interested in further conversation, so Willow fished out her own sketchbook and started a new landscape.

* * *

Dillon grinned at his brother as Ren finally succeeded in convincing Nora to go to sleep, Nora in turn flopped into her sleeping bag and went out like a light, and Ren himself adopted a meditative pose on top of his sleeping bag.

"Welcome to Beacon, huh?" he asked. "We made friends, tomorrow we're gonna slay monsters, we even got a disturbingly cryptic speech from the headmaster. Pretty good first day."

Nova nodded, smiling back. "Pretty good. Still not sure what the whole speech was about, though. 'Welcome. I know your motives and your plans. You have no plans or motives. Get gud, scrub.' Kind of a strange way to welcome the next generation."

Dillon shrugged. "Eh, probably just meant to humble us a little, keep us on our toes. I could bet you ten to one there are more than a few people here who don't really know why they want to be Huntsmen, and at least an equal number who think they're already the kings of the world. Schnee, for instance."

"Dust, that was years ago!" Nova muttered, quietly whacking his brother's face with his pillow.

"It was also traumatizing," Dillon hissed, throwing the pillow back. "Besides, you're the one who said she was waving a flier in Ruby's face."

"Hey, she could just be really insecure. Like, really unbelievably insecure. They do say money can't buy happiness, maybe it's the same with self-respect."

Dillon exhaled. "Yeah, maybe. Whatever, I'll just wait and see. D'you think she still remembers what I did with the chocolate pudding?"

"Probably. That was pretty mean."

"She started it."

"And she's starting something else, it looks like. Oh, Oum, she's yelling at Yang and Ruby again. I'm going over there—" The dark-haired girl in front of whom the other three had been fighting blew out her candles, plunging that part of the room into darkness. "Or not."

"As fascinating as your grudges are, it may be advisable to get some sleep," sounded Ren's monotone voice, and the brothers looked over to see its owner repositioning himself as a face-up plank on top of his sleeping bag.

His skeptical glance at the other boy's sleeping position hidden in the darkness, Dillon assented. "Right. Sorry. See you guys in the morning." He closed his notebook, slid into his own sleeping bag, carefully positioning his pillow and his stuffed koala, and blew out the final candle. "Good night."

* * *

And now the gang really is all here, although they aren't quite together yet.

Willow's hometown is named for the region in Anatolia (modern Turkey) whence the city of Ilion got its alternative name, Troy. Three guesses what happened to it, and the first two don't count. _The Third Crusade_ is, of course, the book that Tukson's Book Trade doesn't stock; given the circumstances in which it was mentioned, I thought Aurora's description of it made some sense. Finally, the Song of Xanthe, which will come up in the future, is a sort of Homeric/Turoldic piece of pre-War Remnant literature, part of the non-canon canon that Willow and Dillon were discussing on the airship.

Chapter 2 has been started, but this is the end of the pre-written pile, so it will take some time to get updates out from now on.


	6. The First Step

2\. The First Step

* * *

 _Aurora,_

 _I am sorry that I could not be there to see you off, daughter. For all the talk of peace, it seems something must be stirring the Grimm. I am glad to hear that you have arrived in Vale safely. Good luck in your Initiation, and be sure to tell us all about it—and your teammates—as soon as you have the time._

 _Love,_

 _Telamon Raines_

* * *

Dillon felt fortunate, later on, that he woke up well before Lie Ren. He had never considered himself a morning person, but Ren's apparently chronic fatigue and Nora's boundless energy made him very, very glad that he had been awake and ready-for-the-day enough to pick up his things, cast an apologetic glance in Ren's direction, and flee for the dining hall before Nora could draw him and Nova into her hurricane of joyous insanity.

Instead, Dillon awoke only a little while after Nora, whose own stuffed animal was a pink Ursa that she'd left on Ren's head, as the sun was beginning to stream through the windows of the ballroom and onto the faces of the sleeping first-years. He lay there for a while, not quite ready to accept that he had regained consciousness, until Nova returned from his dawn photography excursion and placed a mug of hazelnut coffee next to his face. Then, Dillon had hauled himself up into a sitting position, still ensconced in his sleeping bag, and slowly drained the mug. With an expression of thanks to his brother, he gathered his combat outfit and shower supplies and headed for the locker room.

The showers were exactly the kind of horror story he'd heard about. Individual stalls, thank Dust, but nonetheless locker rooms in which one was expected to be nearly naked in the presence of other people. He survived by undressing and dressing inside the shower stall, then brushed his teeth and hurried back to the ballroom, where Nora was singing and dancing around Ren like a child on the Solstice morning.

The dining hall was just as grand as the ballroom, and perhaps larger. Dillon breathed a happy sigh on discovering that they served hazelnut coffee, and proceeded to load his plate with eggs, potatoes, pancakes, and syrup. Nova did the same, and they found a region along one of the tables that was suitably uninhabited, meaning about four empty seats in either direction. Of course, that wasn't enough to deter some people.

"Hi, Dillon!" came the incongruously cheerful voice of Willow Nox. Next to her was a tall, blond girl wearing magenta pants and an equally distinctive teal jacket. Dillon wondered for a moment if he'd seen her somewhere, but he wasn't really feeling like a deep thinker at the moment.

"Willow. Hi," Dillon responded, looking up from the Vale _Reporter_ bulletin on his Scroll. "You do realize it's morning, right? Oh, and this is my brother, Nova. Who's your friend?"

"Aurora Raines," the friend answered, sliding into the seat opposite him. "I'm from Vacuo. Willow said your father has done some fairly significant work on Aura?"

Dillon nodded. "Dust-Aura interaction, specifically. Nothing of very practical just yet, but he's hoping to discover a way to artificially produce Dust crystals, and maybe even allow Dust to work in a vacuum. The SDC actually tried to recruit him for some project a few years ago, but he's cool, so he told the monochrome—hm, jerk—to get lost."

"Although not before we could spend enough time in his daughter's company for Dillon to form an abiding hatred for a girl he's only met once," Nova threw in. "Which we _do_ _not_ want to hear about again," he added, looking at his brother.

"Fascinating," Aurora said, responding more to Dillon's comments than Nova's. "The Schnee company may be rather awful, but my mother works for the Atlesian government directly. Artificial intelligence," she added, with a glance at Nova, "but she's always pretty tight-lipped about what, exactly."

Dillon caught her glance and grinned. "Willow mentioned Nova's V.I. work, huh?"

Aurora nodded curtly, and Nova elaborated. "It's not close to the same level as what your mom's doing—artificial intelligence, formally, refers to the quest to create artificial sentience—but it's still interesting. Basically I'm trying to create a learning-capable program that can fragment and reintegrate its own code. Exact metastability will take years to figure out, if I ever get there, but it could end up being the ultimate in digital security, which is something this world badly needs."

"He hacked his own Scroll once because he forgot his passcode," Dillon stage-whispered.

"No, I didn't!" Nova protested, shoving Dillon on the shoulder. "Just because you can recite the entire Song of Xanthe doesn't mean I can't remember my ID number. I hacked my Scroll because I was bored and didn't have the V.I. project yet."

The girls laughed as Dillon drained the last of his coffee and stood up. "Well, ladies, it's been a pleasure. See you at Initiation."

—

Aurora's locker was number 363, which left her about halfway down (why, exactly, did Beacon have _that_ many equipment lockers?), and right next to the other two big-name members of the matriculating class. The fact that Weiss Schnee seemed to be absolutely focused on Pyrrha Nikos, disregarding entirely the almost-equally-qualified fighter who was literally right next to her, became more and more of a blessing as the heiress spiralled further into her apparent psychotic delusion, but Aurora couldn't shake the feeling of resentment at being passed over so completely. Of course, it wasn't so much that she was being ignored as that, when Weiss did take notice of her, it was while attempting to parade a thoroughly unwilling, but utterly spineless, Pyrrha Nikos like a living embodiment of all the reasons Aurora herself was "not special anymore."

Then, of course, the class clown stepped in.

"You know what else is great? Me. Jaune Arc." The kid was tallish, with blue eyes and unkempt blond hair; he wore jeans and a hoodie beneath a white chestplate and shoulder pauldrons. "Nice to meet you."

"You again?" The heiress was clearly dismayed, and it was easy enough to see why. Pyrrha, however, apparently didn't see, and quickly interposed herself between the two other sword-users.

"Nice to meet you, Jaune!" she said, waving. Aurora stifled a sharp laugh at her antics. She might be strong, but the Champion of Mistral was obviously deeply deficient when it came to any measure of self-confidence or decency. Perhaps that level of fame could be somewhat isolating. Still, Jaune either saw through her desperate self-promotion or simply didn't see her, and pushed past her to refocus on Weiss. When Pyrrha introduced herself again, Aurora couldn't stifle anything, and the three others turned to look at her.

"What's wrong, hot stuff?" Jaune asked, sliding up to her, and Aurora suddenly wanted to hug Weiss and tell her everything was understood and pardoned. "Team Jaune not up to your standards? Don't worry, there's still one spot open, I'm sure I can get you in if you ask nicely!"

Aurora looked at him blankly. "Arc, right? No, you're not up to my standards, and I seriously doubt from what I've seen that you're up to Beacon's standards, either. I'm not even sure why your family let you come to Beacon, much less carry that sword. We are all miles out of your league, and Weiss agrees with me, so go bother Pyrrha if you have to pester one of us."

"Oh, that's not true! I heard what you said, you know," Jaune turned back to Weiss, "there's no shame in knowing what you want. A lot of guys like that, actually, it's—"

"Pyrrha," Weiss called, "a little help here?" For a moment, Aurora was offended again—she was the one on Weiss's side, after all!—before she was forcibly reminded that actually, Pyrrha was the one with a the spear that was apparently very useful for pinning unwanted admirers to conveniently distant walls.

"That was kind of pathetic, Nikos," Aurora muttered once they'd passed the unfortunate knight-errant, to whom Pyrrha had apologized, somewhat needlessly, in Aurora's opinion, as she retrieved her spear.

Pyrrha turned on her, eyes flashing. "I'm sorry?"

"Hey, look, I've had my photo on a few front pages, I get the whole personal-relationships angle. It's lonely, it sucks, but it doesn't mean you have to throw yourself at the first beaming idiot who doesn't know your freaking name. Have some self-respect."

"I wasn't throwing myself at anyone. And with all due respect, I don't think you do know what my life has been like. I'll see you at the cliff." With that, the Mistralian stalked off, leaving the Vacuan and the heiress staring after her.

"Well, she's certainly… interesting," Aurora commented. "Partners?"

Weiss sighed. "Since you appear to have destroyed my chance of a partnership with Pyrrha… why not? We had best hurry, though. We want top credit from the very beginning."

—

Willow slipped, invisibly, through the crowd of students heading to the cliffs. Up ahead, she glimpsed Dillon and Nova; where was Aurora? There she was, talking to Weiss Schnee. Well, she apparently didn't put too much stock in the opinions of others, although that could be a good or a very bad thing depending on the situation. Having fought the White Fang herself, Willow felt somewhat inclined to support their greatest enemy, but faunus in general hated the Schnee Company and the family that owned it for pretty good reason, if any of the reports were true. Still, every family had its black sheep—or its white ewe, as the case went—so Willow decided she'd reserve judgment, and in the meantime find somewhere else to wait for Initiation to begin.

She didn't have to wait long. Moments after she stepped onto a metal pad, standing between a scrawny kid in green, who sported the most ridiculous mohawk she'd ever seen, and a dark-haired girl with what had to be cat ears under that bow, Ozpin and Goodwitch called for attention from near the center of the line.

At the announcement that teams would be formed by eye contact, Willow simply nodded. At least there would be no weeks and days of awkward advances and negotiations as people elbowed each other for the most prestigious or talented partners. On the other hand, she could imagine this going very badly. She knew a few people, at least; she could keep an eye out for them and attempt to avoid locking eyes with any of the less pleasant-looking members of her class.

The fact that they'd be watched and graded was interesting, as well. Willow hoped that the arrangement meant no one who passed the initial entrance exam was deemed particularly likely to fail Initiation, but even so, freak accidents could and did happen in live-fire exercises, especially when uncontrollable elements like the Grimm were in play. On the other hand, they were at Beacon to learn to fight Grimm, and had been allowed in, presumably, because they had showed some expertise in that regard already. She knew from experience that adapting to unforeseen circumstances was not a skill that could be acquired by the study of theory. A forest that was used as a routine practice field was hardly likely to be especially full of things to practice on, so Willow drew her weapons and prepared to fly.

The sound of activating launch pads echoed down the line as she clenched Studied Irony and tried to scan the horizon for features she could use in a landing strategy. Then Idiot Mohawk went sailing off into the distance, and Willow bent at her knees and jumped as the ground sprang up beneath her.

—

Dillon held tight to Taran-Nuada as he soared through the air. Unlike most of his peers, who no doubt viewed their current exercise as a long-distance controlled plummet, Dillon really did feel as though he were flying. Air and land slid by beneath him as he used Taran-Nuada's blade to keep himself on course. Below him, Nova descended like a burning comet, cutting and blasting his way to the ground. Spying a clearing that would do nicely for his own landing, Dillon prepared to touch down in style.

Had another person been watching him, he would have appeared to pause, for a split second, in his flight. The air around him crackled with energy as he drew on his Semblance, and he vanished, carving a brilliant scar through the sky as he thundered to the forest floor. He landed with his left knee and fist planted firmly on the ground, his right hand high and behind him, clutching Taran-Nuada.

"I am freaking awesome," he muttered to himself.

On the plus side, the minor shockwave from his arrival ensured that nothing attacked him before he could stand up. Nothing attacked him, or moved at all, in the few seconds after that, either, so he assumed the clearing itself was, well, clear. Beyond that, however, every Grimm in a substantial radius would have been alerted to his presence. With luck, none of those Grimm would be simultaneously aggressive enough to attack him and old enough to do him harm, and with a bit more luck, he'd find a partner before he ran into Weiss Schnee. He gave Taran-Nuada a spin and started forward, pushing aside some shrubbery as he headed north into the forest.

—

Aurora tucked herself around her torso as she fell ever faster toward the ground, coming out of her roll feet-down, with a disc of light shards at the ready. The twenty-four-pointed star slowed her only a little, but its drag was enough for the Vacuan champion. The array shattered when she hit the treetops, and she leapt forward, grabbing one branch and swinging to the next before her momentum could take her arm off.

A few branches later, she was securely perched on a thick, mid-level branch with a reasonable path to the forest floor. She was about to descend when a rustling noise sounded from the bushes not far off. She drew her pistols silently, prepared for some manner of Grimm to burst from the shadows—instead, it was Weiss Schnee. She drew a breath to call out, but hesitated. The Schnee family's reputation was well-known in Vacuo, and, while Dillon's account of the heiress seemed certain to be an exaggeration, did she really want to risk being stuck with a racist, self-centered princess for the next four years?

Weiss solved the problem by wandering off. Aurora descended carefully—she was inexperienced at tree-climbing, since trees big enough to climb were almost unheard-of in Vacuo—and headed in the opposite direction. She thought she'd seen Willow fall somewhere in that direction, maybe they'd meet up.

—

The air flowed cleanly around Nova's sword, allowing him a measure of control as he descended. As he neared the ground, he flipped himself around, tucking his legs so that the pommel of his sword was pointed cleanly at the ground. A volley of Dust grenades slowed his descent somewhat, but not by that much: they were small rounds, and he was big, especially for his age. Instead, he opted to charge the ground, turning his fall into an attack and thereby taking advantage of the admittedly nonsensical rules that seemed to govern Aura expenditure.

On the bright side, it had rained fairly recently. On the down side, that still wasn't enough to prevent some of the nearby trees from bursting into flame. However, Nova didn't habitually carry a fire extinguisher, so he simply grimaced, hoped he wouldn't get docked too many points, and headed into the forest away from the fire.

* * *

A rare update appeared!

So, oops. Didn't expect having more free time to translate into less writing. I will get through this whole story eventually, though, if only because there are several epic fight scenes that I've already written and really want to use. Chapters will probably vary in length considerably, though, because coming up with this much material that fits together sensibly is hard. Next up, adventures, partnerships, and monsters in The Emerald Forest!

P.S. Points if you recognize the RvB quote or the _Iliad_ reference.


	7. The Emerald Forest

3\. The Emerald Forest

* * *

"They chased him into the wood, where fell beasts prowled and the trees themselves were said to sway evilly in the wind; and thus ended the reign of Don Yoranj, the Mad." — _Legends from Before the Kingdoms_ , vol. IIIA

* * *

The Emerald Forest was dense. Dillon wondered where exactly the Grimm were supposed to be lurking, since almost every square foot was taken up by the branches of shrubs and trees. He considered stowing Taran-Nuada and simply using his backup combat knife to hack through the undergrowth, but despite its versatility, the knife simply wasn't long enough to clear a path any more effectively than the shaft and blade of his polearm. Moreover, it would only be more frustrating; cleansing violence would just have to wait until he found something capable of fighting back.

His wait came to an end with the forest. A small clearing parted the trees in his path, and, as he reached the one-third mark in his progress across it, the edges of the wood came alive with angry noises. Keeping his stride, he flipped his staff in his hands, adjusting his grip from that of a hiker to that of a skilled pikeman fully prepared for combat. When he was halfway, they charged.

They were Beowolves, somewhat to his disappointment, and not even a particularly large number of them. He blasted three before they had halved the distance between him and them, then shot two more before twisting to bisect another and slam the gun end of his staff into the face of a seventh idiot monster. Five more remained, having circled behind him, but before he could act, a red-and-teal figure came sprinting into the clearing.

Energy burst from Aurora Raines's pistols, turning two Beowolf heads to smoking stumps, before shifting form, joining into a quarterstaff that struck two more with obviously devastating force, flipping the corpses onto their backs in a burst of the same energy the pistols cast over range. As she turned to strike down the final Grimm at hand, Dillon, unable to resist, put out a hand and turned the beast, with a flash like a dying lightbulb and a clap like a flag in the wind, to ash.

Before the sparks had faded, Raines had her staff divided and folded into pistols, which were pointed at Dillon's chest. He put his hands up, dropping his staff, and backed away slightly.

"Whoa, hey, there. Didn't mean to startle you. Partners, eh?"

The frozen moment passed, and Aurora relaxed, dropping her arms to holster her guns before holding out a hand, laughter creasing the corners of her eyes.

"Partners," she agreed with an accepting nod, shaking Dillon's hand with a firm, professional grip. "Apparently, I need to practice telling friend from foe."

Dillon shrugged. "As long as you look before you shoot, it's good to be cautious, right? No one wants to be like Uncle Krocon—he had to retire after mistaking a Creep for his partner," he explained. "Anyways, you aren't Schnee, so I'm sure we can work together."

Irritation and bewilderment fused together in Aurora's features. "Okay. What is your problem with her? Because she doesn't seem that bad to me, we're still only half a team, and we're going to be classmates for the next four years no matter what, so you are going to have to get over it."

Dillon recoiled from the verbal assault, holding up his hands placatingly. "Hey, look, I'm joking, OK? I mean, we don't have a good history, which is completely her fault, but I'll give her a second chance. And after that, if it looks like she's changed, I'll give her another chance. Same for everyone else here. I like to base my judgements in fact." He shook his head, shrugging off the debate. "Now come on, north is this way."

"How can you tell?" Aurora asked as he started picking his way through the brush.

He turned back and held up his left hand, allowing sparks to dance between his fingers. "Electricity, remember? It doesn't make me a human compass or anything, but they're pretty closely related. Anyways, all the moss on these trees is growing on one side."

She nodded and shrugged. "Ah. I suppose that's the sort of thing you tend to learn, growing up where there's moss. And trees for the moss to grow on."

"Right, you're from Vacuo, huh? What's it like there?"

"Hot," she said, drily. "Hot and dry and bright. Which is nice in small doses, but when you're more likely to to see a Creep hit by lightning than an actual thunderstorm, it gets to be a bit much. I really love the rain."

"Heh. Yeah, me, too. It's when everything—that's when the world feels _alive_ , isn't it?"

"It is." She paused, looking at him curiously. "I never expected someone from Vale to appreciate the rain like that, seeing as you get it all the time."

He shrugged. "Well, a lot of people do complain about it, and when it's grey skies for days on end it can get to you. But—it's not exactly my element, but it's pretty close. Just before the rain is best, or else when it's really stormy. Today all I'm hoping for is that Nova doesn't start a forest fire. His Semblance can be… a bit messy."

—

Fortunately, a forest dry enough to be ignited by the shockwave Nova's landing strategy produced was not a forest dry enough to be reduced to ash by a handful of burning trees, and a glance backward as the durable swordsman hacked through the undergrowth confirmed that the fires he had caused were smoldering out, rather than spreading any farther. How far had he fallen? Two hundred feet? Three hundred? That differences in altitude created differences in the impact results wasn't surprising, but it could be useful.

He wasn't keeping close track of his progress, so he had no idea how long it was before he heard a sound of which he was not the cause. He stopped, listening. Leaves rustled. A branch cracked. His hand went smoothly, silently to his sword. A footstep behind him. He twisted, drawing his weapon and pointing the hilt at source of the noise as he dropped into a fighting crouch.

"Who's there?" he called.

He sighed and straightened as the air shimmered and Willow Nox revealed herself.

"Hey, Nova." She grinned, saluting with a shotgun-axe. "So, ah... I guess we're partners now, huh?"

He nodded. "No point in wasting time. Shouldn't be too far."

The physical distance may not have been great, but if any effort had gone into curating the Emerald Forest, it had clearly been devoted to making it the most impassable stretch of terrain within miles of the kingdom's borders, and very possibly beyond. Still, Nova had studied and Willow had learned through long experience how to navigate hostile wilderness, and before long they stood in front of an obviously ancient grotto. Weapons drawn, they proceeded slowly into the cave, feet crunching on the graveled floor. Rivulets of water trickled in the opposite direction, and the splashing of the source echoed ominously from ahead.

"Is it just me, or is it getting warmer?" Willow asked, her voice tight.

"No, I feel it, too." Early spring in Vale was always cool, and the damp and shade had made the cave outright chilly not far from the entrance. Here, though, there was something alive. Something big.

Nova stopped short, just barely restraining himself from sliding over the edge of the chasm that opened up without warning. Small rocks bounced down into the darkness, splashing in a deeper, noisier pool below.

"This isn't the temple," Willow whispered, already backing away.

"No, it's not," Nova concurred, turning toward the entrance. "Let's go."

A menacing growl drifted up as the two left the chasm behind them, and was quickly followed by a thoroughly bone-chilling cry. Combined with the skin-chilling damp of the grotto, the effect was even more off-putting, and Nova and Willow heaved sighs of relief as they poured into the sunlight.

Their relief was short-lived, however, as the growls and footsteps of the beast they'd woken echoed down the corridor and out of the cave. Moments later, its huge, armored body displacing piles of rock and dirt, the Grimm shoved itself through the mouth of the cave and howled.

"Oh, no," Willow breathed, and Nova had to agree. The monster they were facing was a Chimera. Its serpent head struck at them, spitting sparks, and they dove to either side. As he came up, Nova unleashed a volley of explosive rounds that staggered the beast, but did not appear to harm it. He leapt back from a clawed paw and held his sword in a classical defensive stance, scanning for his partner, who had either turned invisible or abandoned him. With no other option, he regarded the three-headed Grimm, searching for an option.

Nova didn't know where Willow had gone, but it was obvious he couldn't outrun the Chimera on his own. The serpent head reached above and between the monstrous, vaguely mammalian faces—one horned, one saber-toothed—and hissed at him, then started gathering energy between its fangs. Nova prepared his sword, hoping he wouldn't have to overburn his Aura too much to withstand the initial blast, when a loose axehead flew past him, bounced off the serpent's nose, and flew back behind him on his other side. Moments later, a chain tightened around his waist, and he barely kept his grip on his sword as he was dragged backward through the forest, the Chimera spitting fire around itself in anger. Moments later, he crashed to the ground as his partner disentangled him from her weapon.

"Willow—What—" he tried to catch his breath as he regained his feet, but the infiltrator was already moving.

"Come on! We have to stay ahead of that thing!" she yelled back.

This was true. They couldn't run forever, but Nova supposed he ought to hold his tongue until one of them came up with a better idea. So, they ran.

—

The forest temple was, in fact, more of a ruined shrine. Only a third of what looked to be the original wall remained, and within that circle perhaps half of the columns and the ribbon of stone they supported were standing, either. Only the floor was mostly intact to give a sense of what the structure had once truly looked like, and arrayed around, it in a partial circle, were almost two dozen stool-sized pillars, most of which still held the chess pieces that Aurora surmised to be the relics.

"We aren't the first ones here," she noted, gesturing to the empty pillars.

"Guess not," Dillon nodded, following her arm. "But we're still in the upper half. Wonder if anyone got here without encountering any Grimm at all?"

"Could be. If they use this forest every year, the population must be kept fairly small. Besides, older Grimm rarely venture this close to the kingdoms. Or so I've been told." Aurora calmly suppressed the memory of the massive shapes she'd glimpsed in the distance during the airship voyage from Vacuo.

Dillon nodded again, apparently mulling over the possible conditions their classmates might have encountered. Suddenly, he looked up and walked briskly to a pillar.

"White bishop?" he asked, holding up one such piece. Its partner sat on a stand about a third of the way around the circle.

"I suppose. Any reason?"

"I've always had a fondness for loremasters, and the diagonal move gets overlooked more than you'd think. Plus white gets the initiative."

Aurora cocked her head, placing her hands on her hips. "It's restrictive, too, though—you can only ever reach half the squares on the board. And moving too early can expose your strategy." On the other hand, of course, decisive action was sometimes necessary: knowing Pistris's weapons and abilities had allowed her to strike quickly and earn a decisive victory in her last regional tournament.

"We'll be in a team, though. Two bishops can cover everything, just like a team of Huntsmen and Huntresses can do more than a single one on their own. And it's better to risk having your first strategy be interrupted than stay on the back foot until you get knocked over." Aurora wondered again whether her partner was entirely as steady as he looked at first glance; he'd put a lot more thought into picking a chess piece than most people would consider sane. Maybe they could spar after this exercise was over, and she would see then how much of his behavior was unusual thoughtfulness and how much was simply eccentricity. Then again, she had conceded his point internally right before he'd said it.

"Fair enough. Grimm aren't exactly chess masters, demanding the utmost care before you commit to an attack, are they? That's just us."

"That's what I was thinking." His head snapped up, his gaze turning to the treeline from which they'd recently descended. "Hey, Yang!" he called, waving his arm.

Following his gaze, Aurora saw that two girls had emerged from the forest, one a little shorter and dark-haired, the taller one gold-blonde—almost emphatically so, given how much hair she had—and dressed like an Atlesian in Vacuo. The latter girl, Yang, was returning Dillon's wave, and after a moment she said something to her companion and they started toward the temple.

"Hey, Dillon! This is Blake, and you are—?"

"Aurora Raines." She held out her hand and received an unexpected low-five from Yang. Blake simply murmured, "Hi," and wandered over to the chess pieces.

"These are the relics?" she asked, sounding surprised and a little skeptical.

"Chess pieces." Dillon shrugged, holding up the white bishop he'd taken.

Yang turned to the relics and seized a white knight piece, holding it out for Blake to see. "Alright. How about a cute little pony?" she asked.

Blake agreed and smiled softly, looking half amused and half studiously aloof, and Aurora wondered at the easy camaraderie that had already manifested between two girls who were contrasts to the point of being stereotypes.

The calm, however, was soon interrupted by a high-pitched cry in the distance, followed by another, faint but growing steadily louder, and, Aurora realized as she saw Blake subtly pointing upwards, coming from the sky.

* * *

Hail, hail, the gang's—not quite all here, yet. We get to die together next chapter. Sorry for the long wait, again, but life is demanding. These keep getting shorter, too, but when things get more interesting the chapters should get longer again.

Not much that needs explaining this week, at least as pertains to this fic. Aurora's outfit has been retconned slightly, so go back and check the "trailer" and/or "The First Step" if you care either way.

Finally, the chapters immediately following the next one are going to diverge a little from the precise shadowing of canon that's been taking place so far. Instead of the intra-RWBY focus of "The Badge and the Burden," we'll see DAWN figuring out how they're going to live and work together, and the development of their relationships with RWBY and especially JNPR in ways that will, for better or worse, extend well beyond the time-frame of "Jaunedice."

Happy Hunting!


	8. Players and Pieces

4\. Players and Pieces

* * *

"The strength of the Huntress is her company, and the strength of the company is the Huntress."

—Telamon Raines

* * *

Ruby Rose was falling from the sky. Dillon resisted the urge to hum "It's Raining Men" on technical grounds, then quickly started panicking about how to prevent her from being seriously injured by the ground. Fortunately, someone else got there first. First meaning that an armored form slammed into Ruby from the side and both figures disappeared into a largish, well-foliaged tree.

"Did your sister just fall from the sky?" Blake asked Yang.

Before anyone could say anything, a cacophony erupted at the edge of the forest, where a roaring Ursa staggered out of the trees, pink explosions dotted with electric sparks blooming behind it. Wherever it had come from, however, it lasted no longer, slumping to the ground to reveal a short, orange-haired girl who darted down to examine her makeshift steed.

"Aww, it's broken," Nora Valkyrie mourned. Lie Ren, emerging from farther behind the beast, was not nearly so disappointed.

"Nora, please. Let's never do that again."

The irrepressibly hyperactive girl paid him no mind, however, and darted over to the chess pieces, which she examined with the intense wonder of a geologist who'd just found a rare vein of Dust. She snatched up a white rook piece and placed it on her head, dancing and singing—" _I'm queen of the castle, I'm queen of the castle!"_ —before Ren's irritated shout restrained her.

"Did that girl just ride in on an Ursa?" Blake asked no one in particular. Before no one could respond to her rhetorical question, however, the trees burst apart, and a red-haired armored figure, immediately recognizable to the remotely worldly as the very same Pyrrha Nikos whom Dillon had avoided on the airship, began sprinting across the clearing. Dillon was impressed; he hadn't known it was possible to sprint for as long as she looked like she'd been sprinting.

"Jaune!" Pyrrha called, looking toward the tree into which Ruby Rose and the flying knight had disappeared.

"Pyrrha!" Presumably-Jaune called back.

The excitement had apparently stirred Ruby, who leapt down from the tree and raced to the group at the actual temple. "Yang!" she cried, waving to her sister.

"Ruby!" Yang called back, reaching to embrace her sibling.

"Nora!" Nora exclaimed, abruptly inserting herself between the siblings.

Dillon sighed.

Blake asked another rhetorical question.

Yang, already smoldering, exploded. "I can't take it anymore!" she yelled, fire wreathing her body and coloring her eyes. "Can everyone just _chill out for two seconds_ before something _crazy_ happens again!?"

At that moment, Nova and Willow arrived, charging out of the woods to the sound of roars that were at least more distant than the Deathstalker currently chasing the Champion of Mistral.

"Nova!" Dillon called, waving. "Grab a bishop, we saved one for you!"

"Awesome!" Nova replied, already reaching the stone circle. "What's all this crazy stuff that's been happening?"

Willow grabbed the second white bishop as Aurora answered, crossing her arms sardonically. "Oh, the usual. Some girl fell from the sky, another rode in on an Ursa with her partner, and, oh yes, the Champion of Mistral is running across the clearing with a Deathstalker on her rear."

Nova looked up, eyes sharpening and expression falling a little. "Oh. Yeah, that could be a problem."

"Might also be a good time to mention the Chimera that's chasing us," Willow supplied, using her invisibility to slip into their circle.

"Oh, yeah. That thing," Nova nodded, looking intently at the Deathstalker. "Ten feet tall, maybe twelve, breathes fire. Light sleeper."

"You woke a Chimera?" Dillon asked, eyed wide. "Monty Oum, I thought this place would be _mildly_ thinned out if they use it every blessed year. Three major Grimm and eleven of us to deal with them. This will be interesting."

"Twelve, actually," Willow corrected him, pointing to the sky, whence Weiss Schnee was now following Ruby's example.

Her descent was interrupted by the chivalric intervention of the knight who'd intercepted Ruby much less intentionally, and atop whom the heiress landed when the duo swiftly met the earth.

"What an idiot," Aurora muttered to herself.

Pyrrha dove across the rst of the clearing, sprawling in the dirt in front of the temple.

"Didn't say anything," Aurora muttered again. Fortunately, the Mistralian appeared not to hear her.

"Great," Yang said with the sarcastic cheer that reminded Dillon why they'd gotten along, "the gang's all here! Now we can all die together!"

"Not if I can help it!" her sister shouted, whipping out her extra-jumbo mecha-scythe and charging the heavily armored Deathstalker with a battle cry that cut off abruptly as she and her weapon crashed uselessly against the monster's scales.

Dillon readied Taran-Nuada, aware of Aurora, Nova, and Willow drawing their own arms, but felt helpless to watch as a giant Nevermore swooped overhead and cast down its feathers to pin Ruby in place, until Weiss Schnee activated a glyph and fairly teleported to the reaper's side, where she caught the Grimm's great stinger in a pillar of ice. At the edge of the woods, trees shattered once more as Nova and Willow's Chimera finally arrived on the scene.

"Alright, everyone who hasn't grab a relic, and let's go!" Dillon shouted. "All we need now is to get back to the cliffs!"

"Run and live," Jaune nodded. "That is an idea I can get behind."

There was a problem, however, that had nothing to do with the apparent animosity between Aurora and the armored Huntsman, whom she had shot a dirty look: the route to the cliffs lay across a yawning chasm crisscrossed by ancient structures, and the path to the first bridge consisted of a several-hundred-yard dash across open ground. The Deathstalker was one thing, but on such territory they would never outrun the Chimera. Schnee's ice cracked audibly as the Deathstalker began to free its tail; the Nevermore cawed as it began circling around to attack.

"Time we left," Ren announced.

"Right," Ruby agreed, pocketing a white knight and waving forward. "Let's go!"

—

As Aurora went to follow Ruby and the others, Dillon grabbed her arm. "We can't outrun that Chimera on open ground. We have to get past the Deathstalker and take that thing out."

She raised an eyebrow. "And then what about the Deathstalker?"

He shrugged. "We'll figure something out. Come on, let's buy them some time."

Aurora nodded, following her partner, Willow, and Nova away from the cliffs.

Getting past the Deathstalker was surprisingly easy; they simply scattered into the edges of the forest and let it continue past them, chasing after the more numerous others, then regrouped to intercept the bounding Chimera.

Intercepting a twelve-foot-tall, three-headed monster was about as easy as it sounded.

Nova threw himself into its path, sword afire, forcing it to draw up short. It reared on its hind legs and roared, and Aurora quickly cast her shield dome around the swordsman before joining Dillon and Willow in strafing the monster from behind.

The concentrated fire on its sides and rear caught the Grimm's attention, and it whirled to strike at them. Willow, using her invisibility, dove away from a series of claw strikes and then vanished to avoid a sustained beam of fire from the serpent mouth. Aurora again inserted herself between the blast and its target, diffusing the firestream with her dome shield. Dillon charged in, landing lightning strikes against the Chimera's forelegs and upper chest, then threw himself to the side to avoid a retaliatory squishing. Aurora followed suit, dropping her shield and running for cover as the other three provided covering fire.

"It's too tough to take out with brute force!" Nova called. "Any ideas?"

Aurora popped out of cover again to pepper the Chimera. The Deathstalker appeared to have some of their friends pinned at the first bridge; the Nevermore was circling over the chasm. "We have to keep it occupied," she said, ducking again as the serpent head turned her way. Then she added, sarcastically, "Maybe we could try to ride it?"

"That's it!" Dillon cried. "Nova, use your overburn! Try to get Willow high enough to land on its back without being seen!"

The two in question nodded, and the swordsman stepped out of cover, crouching and holding his sword above his head. Willow jumped onto the wide blade, and flames erupted around Nova as he leapt up, thrusting his sword as far as he could; Willow, propelled by her own jump and her partner's boost to her Aura, soared into the air before disappearing. Nova caught another flame blast on his sword before diving back behind his boulder, and Dillon and Aurora poured every round they could into the Chimera's hide.

—

Unheard and unseen, Willow arced above the fray, eyes locked on the snarling beast below. The Chimera was fast, but not especially agile, so it remained stuck largely in place, unable to pick a target as it came under fire from three directions. Then she fell, axes at the ready to cut off the head of the snake.

Without warning, however, the beast reared up as she was almost upon it, and her axes instead bit into the monster's shoulders, allowing it to twist and nearly throw her. She slipped over to one side, the axe in her left hand coming loose from the monster. Before she could fall off entirely, though, she flicked the tiny switch on her right-hand axe, releasing the chain that connected the head to the shaft and swinging around the lion head's neck to resume her perch.

The serpent head hissed and turned around as the Chimera continued trying to buck her off, but she took aim with her free axe as it came around to face her and caught the back of its mouth with a shotgun blast. It reared back, and she hooked the lower curve of her axe around its neck for better purchase while continuing to tighten the chain around the lion head: she wasn't exactly about to chop it off, but the Chimera's exertions on the lion head's side were becoming palpably more labored.

The others must have noticed, as well, because one of Aurora's impenetrable shield domes appeared around the goat head, its constituent shards cutting into its throat, suffocating it. The beast staggered right, then left, its heads that weren't encased in airtight bubbles snarling for breath.

A blinding, sunlike flare caught her eye as Nova, again enveloped in the flames that he'd used to boost her jump, charged the Chimera from the side. His sword flashed down in a brilliant, orange arc that severed the lion head just above the chain of her weapon. Even as the first head dissolved into ash, a thunderbolt descended from low altitude as Dillon rendered the once three-headed monster a mere broad-shouldered beast with a serpent's face. Sliding across the monster's back as it staggered left under the force of the spearman's blow, Willow caught herself with the axe that was still hooked around the final head. Drawing her free axe up to her opposite shoulder, Willow swung with all her strength along the length of her other arm and decapitated the Grimm entirely.

She hopped off as the ends of its fur began to decay, landing next to her partner and looking in the direction of the cliffs. Pyrrha Nikos and her partner, along with Ren and Nora, were gathered before the destroyed first bridge, evidently having been trapped and forced to take on the Deathstalker, whose absence suggested they had been rather successful. Farther on, though, was a sight that strained her wilds-loosened sense of credulity: A tiny red dot that had to be Ruby was dragging the Nevermore, a flying Grimm several times her size, up the very cliffs. She reached the top and continued running, turning the rock into a counterforce that allowed her to cut through the monster's tough feathers and behead the massive bird.

"Wow," Dillon murmured. "Wow."

—

"Cardin Winchester. Russell Thrush. Dove Bronzewing. Sky Lark." Ozpin's voice boomed across the cavernous hall as the armored, dull-colored, jockish-looking students' mugshots appeared and rearranged themselves on the monitors above the stage where the headmaster and the new team stood. "The four of you collected the black bishop pieces. From this day forward, you will work together as Team Cardinal, led by… Cardin Winchester."

Nova wasn't quite sure why Ozpin kept pausing dramatically, since the team leader's initial always went first, and in some cases the team was more or less named for them. Like Cardin and CRDL.

Ozpin nodded to the newly-crowned team, which in Nova's opinion was really more of a mud color, and they proceeded off stage, Winchester swinging his hollow mace like a swagger stick. Nova wasn't overly fond of rushed opinions or long-held grudges, but the way Team CRDL's members carried themselves made him suspect their relationship with himself and his friends would be less than a happy one.

Most initiates had made their way back to the cliffs with partner and relic by early afternoon, turning in their chess pieces to Professors Goodwitch and Ozpin before gathering in the ballroom to introduce their old friends and new partners and to regale each other with humorous anecdotes and a few truly tales of their experiences that day.

The headmaster's voice drew him back to the present, as the third-to-last team was summoned to the stage. "Jaune Arc. Nora Valkyrie. Pyrrha Nikos." Surprised, muffled gasps and whispers ran around the auditorium. "Lie Ren. The four of you retrieved the white rook pieces. From now on, you will work together as Team Juniper, led by… Jaune Arc."

"Oh, come on," Aurora whispered as Pyrrha knocked her leader to the floor with a friendly shoulder punch, and Nova couldn't quite blame her. Jaune had demonstrated potential in fighting the Deathstalker, according to the enthusiastic recounting of the fight Nora had offered after lunch, but he'd come across as definitely less capable than his renowned partner, and Ren also appeared to have both the fighting skill and the calm intelligence most people would expect of the leader of a team of Hunters. Perhaps Nova's fellow swordsman had hidden depths or tactical genius that Ozpin hoped to draw out. JNPR exited stage left, no bears or other predators in sight, and it was his group's turn.

"Dillon Aiolos. Aurora Raines. Willow Nox. Nova Aiolos. The four of you retrieved the white bishop pieces. From this day forward, you will work together as Team Dawn, led by… Dillon Aiolos." Dillon swallowed audibly, but nodded with determined confidence. Nova knew his brother might not be much help in restraining Nora or Ruby, but Team DAWN would be the tightest ship in the school or he'd have to take his brother to the infirmary to get checked for rare wasting diseases. Aurora offered their leader a low-five, and Nova moved up to give his brother a side-hug as the four of them proceeded in the footsteps of Team JNPR.

Behind them, Ozpin announced the final team: "Ruby Rose. Weiss Schnee. Blake Belladonna. Yang Xiao-Long. The four of you retrieved the white knight pieces. From this day forward, you will work together as Team Ruby, led by… Ruby Rose."

Well, yes. As though anyone else would lead a team named RWBY. She was still a curious choice, though: two years younger than most students, a year younger than Nova himself, with proven tendencies toward impetuous, rash, and risky behavior. Then again, she'd martialed those traits to take down an adult Nevermore, and the only one who looked clearly dissatisfied was Weiss Schnee, who, despite her swift action to rescue her partner, was still quite clearly childish in her own right, and badly spoiled to boot. Yang obviously had no issue ceding at least formal authority to her younger sister, whom she snatched up in a smiling bear hug that left the new team leader's boots several inches off the floor.

High-fives abounded as the final team made their way off the stage, and Professor Goodwitch took their place to announce that their dorm assignments and schedules would be sent to their Scrolls during dinner, which would commence soon. It was indeed remarkable, Nova thought, how the mention of food could remind teenagers who might have gone hours more without eating how hungry they were at that moment. But as long as no one—he glanced at Nora, still jumping and talking excitedly to Ren—started a hall-clearing food fight, everything was sure to turn out fine.

* * *

Postscript: Internal Affairs

After dinner, the new team walked with RWBY and JNPR to their dorms. As it happened, the three teams had been placed close together, perhaps intentionally: RWBY held the room at the end of one side of the hall, with JNPR given the one opposite, and DAWN just up the hall from JNPR.

After bidding their friends goodnight, Team DAWN took stock of their new quarters. Four beds, laid out in pairs on either side of a window opposite the door; two doors just past the feet of each bed, which contained shallow closets with room for combat gear, uniforms—already hanging—and a few extra articles of clothing; desks and chairs, stationed against the wall with the corridor; and shallow bookshelves set below the window. Aurora and Nova immediately claimed the beds closest to the window, while Dillon checked his Scroll.

"Alright, guys," he said, looking up, "classes start at nine a.m. tomorrow. That means we should be up, showered, and dressed no later than eight if we want time for a quick breakfast beforehand. Waking up at six-thirty should give us plenty of time, although you should feel free to be up earlier than that if you prefer a more intensive morning workout." He glanced at Aurora, who shrugged. "We can always save those for the weekend, I guess. And we'll have plenty of time to practice outside of classes during the week, although it will take me at least a couple days to draw up an appropriate schedule."

"Schedule?" Willow moaned, having taken the bed next to Aurora's.

"Yes. We'll need to practice regularly to improve our skills, and practice together in order to increase our coordination as a team. We have all our classes together, which simplifies things, but I'll still need to get a sense of your styles before I figure out exactly what we need to work on."

"I practice plenty. And don't we have the teachers for that?" she retorted.

"We are our own most valuable resources," he answered. "Remember what Professor Ozpin said last night? It's up to us to take the first step. That means using every resource available to us to become better Huntsmen and Huntresses. Speaking of—Nova, how much coffee did you bring?"

"We should be good for the next two weeks at least. We can get more in the dispensary."

"Good, good. I'll have to check and make sure they have hazelnuts, too. Do you take your coffee with anything?" He directed the last part at Willow and Aurora.

"The blood of my enemies. Or milk if we can't get that here," Willow muttered from beneath her pillow. Aurora's answer was to pull a jar of Vacuan pepper seeds from her duffel bag. Dillon looked at his partner in horror and moved on to the next order of business.

"Okay, we don't have our own bathroom. There's no curtain. Where the hell do we change?"

* * *

Two updates in two weeks, I'm on a roll here! The Chimera was not a fight scene I wrote in advance, for fairly intuitive reasons: it's hard to take a fight that's built around linear architecture and add a third party (or in this case fifth and sixth parties). On top of that, the Chimera didn't really have a single "weak point" DAWN could exploit dramatically the way JNPR used the Deathstalker's stinger and RWBY used the cliff to behead the Nevermore. I hope the team attack dynamic worked at least serviceably well.

Yes, the POV shifts (if you can call them that with third-person narration) were fairly uneven this chapter, but that's how the natural breaks fell. I also usually default to writing Dillon, so he's going to be the most frequent POV character, followed by Nova, who feels easiest for me to characterize via stylistically.

Next up: Classes! Fight scenes shall abound.


	9. Test Your Might

5\. Test Your Might

* * *

"No matter what Professor Port may tell you, powerful Grimm are extremely difficult to imprison. Students are not."

—Glynda Goodwitch

* * *

Willow opened her eyes at the literally rousing cacophony of some classical Atlesian symphony. The sun was up, if only just so, but Dillon was already rolling out of bed and maneuvering into his running clothes behind an artistically wrapped sheet. Aurora stirred in the bed next to Willow's, glaring at their team leader's Scroll before forcing herself to get up and follow his example. Nova was doing the same, grumbling in a way that suggested this was entirely expected behavior, so Willow gathered her spirits and made herself the fourth wakeful member of Team DAWN, which at the moment was an all too appropriate name.

Dillon tapped his Scroll to silence the violin and trumpet crescendos before heading out the door. It was brisk, and Willow was surprised to notice that Aurora seemed unaffected by the chilly air before remembering that deserts tended to see substantial day-night temperature swings. They spread out gradually, Nova taking a slower pace while Dillon restrained himself just enough not to lose his brother, with Aurora and Willow roughly keeping pace with her partners, Aurora slightly behind Dillon and Willow a little ahead of Nova.

They returned to the dorms before seven, splitting up to gulp water and to shower, and reconvened in their room at seven-thirty. Dillon appeared inordinately happy with the tie and sweater vest included in the male uniform, while Aurora fussed with the bizarrely short skirt girls had to wear, and Willow frowned at the amount of color she was being forced to don.

None of them had seen any of RWBY or JNPR as yet, but the echoing of Nora's voice from the latter room and of what sounded like scraping furniture in the latter reassured them that their friends would be down to breakfast fairly quickly. Needless to say, that reassurance proved misguided, but perhaps they had brought food and decided to eat in their rooms. In any case, the hall's array of pancakes and other morning delicacies was distraction enough that Willow didn't wonder, nor did any of her teammates ask, where RWBY and JNPR might be until they had taken their seats in Professor Port's class, with the seconds ticking down until the lecture began.

Both teams tumbled into the room moments ahead of the bell, red-faced and out of breath. They assumed their seats in hasty silence, faces reddening somewhat further with the knowledge of the eyes upon them. Professor Peter Port, however, appeared to take no notice, instead standing up, or perhaps getting down, from his desk at the exact moment the bell rang and, without visibly opening his eyes, began to speak.

Halfway through the lecture, Willow was sketching in her notebook, Nova appeared to be coding on his Scroll, Jaune was asleep, and Ruby was alternately snoozing and goofing off to amuse Blake and Yang. She couldn't quite tell what the others were doing, but only Pyrrha and Dillon actually appeared to be taking notes. She finished sketching the Grimm on the wall behind Port and was starting to add the professor, who would adopt a horse stance and be preparing to hurl his blunderaxe in one hand while beckoning the monster with the other, when Weiss stood up and yelled something.

It turned out Weiss had been volunteering to fight a Grimm Port had captured—who _captured_ Grimm?—and the dynamic between her and Ruby was obviously a tense one. Ultimately, Weiss speared the Boarbatusk after stunning it with her glyphs, a tactic whose effectiveness Willow had to acknowledge: she herself would have had far more difficulty forcing such a creature to expose its weak spot. The bell rang before Port could launch into another reminiscence, and DAWN hurried to prepare for combat class before they could get caught in the vicinity of Team RWBY's self-evident dysfunctionality.

—

Combat class met in the amphitheater where they had gathered when they first arrived at Beacon, although now the class was directed to the seats that ringed the lower area, leaving the arena to the students chosen to test their skills. Professor Glynda Goodwitch, combat instructor, was perhaps more intimidating than Professor Glynda Goodwitch, deputy headmistress, and as a result, hanging on her every word did nothing to allow Willow to actually process what she was saying.

"Our first contestants will be Willow Nox and Ruby Rose."

That got through. Willow jumped up nervously and hurried to the lower level, carrying herself half at attention lest Goodwitch find something to criticize. She could take Ruby, surely, but even a tiny slip-up might be excoriated, no matter the outcome. Oh, well. She was here to learn, and hearing exactly how she sucked would have to be a part of that.

She and Ruby took their stances across the circle from one another. Goodwitch cut the lights to the bleachers, leaving the duelists with the illusion of total solitude. She counted down, and the match began.

Ruby charged instantly, her figure blurring with her sudden acceleration. Instinctively, Willow went invisible and dove to the side, leaving the younger girl's scythe to sweep harmlessly above her head. Moving as quickly as possible, Willow leapt after the decelerated Ruby, landing glancing axe-blows that dented her Aura, before putting distance between herself and her opponent and unloading her shotguns. Ruby stumbled momentarily under the rapid assault before darting out of the way, a flurry of rose petals the only indication of her presence.

Willow went invisible again, stepping out of the way only to collide with the reaper, taking a hit to her own Aura as both fighters tumbled across the floor. They reoriented themselves simultaneously, and Ruby was off again before Willow could tackle her, but this time Willow began to recognize the pattern in Ruby's movements. She went invisible again and dropped to the floor, striking to either side of herself with Studied Irony. Her left-hand weapon caught Ruby's shin, bringing the girl down to visible speed and launching her head-over-heels through the air. Firing after her with the same hand, Willow reached up and caught Crescent Rose with her right-hand axe, parting opponent and weapon before focusing both guns on Ruby, shredding the prone girl's Aura with a pitiless barrage.

Eventually, of course, Ruby regained her feet and escaped the double cone of gunfire, but her Aura was already down significantly. Willow retreated to the sniper-scythe and caught Ruby across the face as she picked it up, then used her invisibility to allow disorienting, momentary images of herself as she kept inside the long weapon's guard and at Ruby's back as much as possible, landing continuous axe-blows before once again wrestling Crescent Rose from Ruby's grip and catapulting it across the arena. Ruby turned to chase it, and Willow caught the hood of her cloak with a grapple-launched axe-head, seized her by her foot, and kicked her across the arena, following up with a series of shotgun blasts that tracked her flight.

By the time Ruby reached her weapon, her Aura was solidly orange, and Willow was nowhere to be seen. As Ruby scanned the area frantically for any sign of her invisible foe, Willow walked carefully up behind her, placing Studied Irony behind the small of her back, and pulled the triggers. Ruby fell forward, stumbling under the force of the point-blank double blast, and Goodwitch called the match. Willow's Semblance use had drained her Aura substantially, but she was still above half, while Ruby's finally hovered just below the knockout bar.

Goodwitch praised her use of her natural advantages and critiqued her reliance on her Semblance, noting with a glance toward Team JNPR that such tactics would not always be effective. Ruby's devastated appearance didn't stop Goodwitch from pointing out that she, too, relied excessively on her Semblance and moved predictably to boot, though she made a point of noting that Willow was a _uniquely_ challenging opponent. Unsure of how complementary that remark was, Willow thanked the professor and headed for the bleachers.

—

"Aurora Raines and Pyrrha Nikos."

The Vacuan champion smiled at her Mistralian counterpart as she stood and high-fived her teammates—encouraging gestures from Dillon and Nova, congratulations to Willow, who was still receiving angry looks from Yang—before closing her eyes for a second and making her way to the arena. Nikos was skilled, sure: she hadn't won the regional tournament three years in a row for nothing. But "Invincible"? This was Aurora's chance to prove herself, and she would take it.

Goodwitch cut the lights and counted down, and both champions charged. Aurora's eyes flashed purple as she blocked Pyrrha's opening strike and vaulted over her, but the Mistralian caught Aurora's own first blows on her sword and shield as easily as if Aurora had just thrown a haymaker at her hand. The red-and-gold sword cut across Aurora's midsection before she could close her guard, and she backflipped hastily to get out of range.

Pyrrha shifted her sword into a rifle as Aurora landed, and it was a simple matter to block her shots with a dome shield. Before Pyrrha could adjust her stance or weapon, Aurora tensed her legs and sprang, arcing across the arena as she sought to pepper her foe from a distance. Azalea Shadow spat twin streams of Dust rounds at the figure on the ground, but those Pyrrha didn't dodge she simply blocked with her shield, which swept in as Aurora landed to strike her ankles and knock her off her feet.

Aurora scrambled to her feet in time to dodge a vicious downward strike, rapidly extending her guns into staves and joining them into their quarterstaff form. But for all her speed and training, Aurora somehow seemed unable to keep up with the champion of Mistral. Pyrrha's defense never faltered, and time and again she slipped through where Aurora had been sure she was about to block her.

The one-sidedness of the fight was beyond frustrating, but Aurora had grown up in Vacuo, and if her mother's Atlesian reserve had rubbed off on her, then so too had her own homeland's tenacity. Deserts, after all, did not favor those who gave in to impossible odds.

Backflipping out of the melee to gain space, Aurora left a shield dome behind her as she went, and Pyrrha's last strike clashed uselessly against translucent, golden panes. There were too many ways for fusing the panes, as she'd done the day before in the forest, to go wrong against a human opponent, so she simply took a moment to regard her fellow tournament winner. Pyrrha was far too fast for any of the tricks she'd used against Pistris. Still, she charged in, splitting Azalea Shadow into baton form at the last second and launching simultaneous up-down, left-right strikes that Pyrrha blocked with ease until Aurora's right-hand weapon, her weak side, crashed awkwardly against sword crossed with shield and flew from her grasp. Aurora tried to take advantage of the position each of them had ended up in to land a blow on the opposite side of Pyrrha's body from both her shield and her sword, but her opponent simply dropped out of the way and kicked her legs out from under her.

Aurora sprang to her feet again and managed to retrieve her weapon, warding off a blow from Pyrrha, who had followed her retreat intent on allowing her no breathing room. From then on, it was a lost cause, though Aurora managed to drag out the fight by concentrating solely on defense. In the end, Pyrrha caught her in the ribs with a spear-jab, spun to strike her back, and finished her with a shield rim to the temple that Aurora was far too tired to summon a barrier to block, despite the comparative slowness of the move. She stumbled backward, falling on her rear and just managing to catch herself with the hand that wasn't holding her forehead as Goodwitch called the match.

Pyrrha's Aura was still at one hundred percent. She had failed.

"A fine match, both of you," Goodwitch congratulated them, although Aurora couldn't see the point of treating them equally when one person clearly needed to do much, much better than she had. "Miss Raines, do try to keep control of your weapons, and work with your team to develop tactics that will be more effective against highly skilled opponents. Not all of us can be invincible," Pyrrha flushed, and Aurora took a moment's satisfaction in that, "but that's no reason we shouldn't use every resource at our disposal to improve ourselves—that goes for all of you," she added, glancing up at the bleachers. "Miss Nikos, a fine performance. I trust that the hard work that brought you this far will continue throughout your time at Beacon."

So there she was. A mere mortal, no different than anyone else, because she was most certainly not Pyrrha Nikos. She looked up at her team as she headed for the exit to the arena. Maybe being nothing special really would be nice experience for a change; everyone else said it would be. But she'd be damned if she wasn't going to do everything in her power to best the Invincible Girl before the year was done.

—

"Dillon Aiolos and Nora Valkyrie."

The miniature hammer-wielder pumped her fist as she leapt to her feet, staggering Pyrrha with her high-five. Dillon nodded to his own returning teammate, quietly praising her effort as they slid past each other. He knew next to nothing about Nora's fighting style, though he'd seen enough in the Emerald Forest to know that she was daring and capable of using her formidable strength with terrifying precision. Even so, she wouldn't likely be as fast as he was, and he would have to use that to his advantage.

Nora held her grenade launcher in front of her, extending it to form a hammer somewhat taller than herself, while Dillon held his left hand open in front of him, keeping Taran-Nuada flush with right arm and hooked behind his back, the blade pointing down and to the side.

Nora charged, hammer held high in a surprisingly telegraphed attack. Dillon tensed as she drew near, then, giving himself an extra boost with his Semblance, he leapt into the air moments before her hammer crashed down where he'd been. Rather than become a floating target, he quickly shifted himself in mid-air, firing his staff upwards to propel himself toward the ground, flipping over the staff as he descended to bring the blade down across Nora's back in a lightning-infused super-strike.

The effect, however, was not entirely what Dillon had anticipated. Her Aura dropped slightly, but not nearly as far as it should have. Why quickly became clear, to Dillon's dawning horror, as the girl, faint sparks of electricity still humming along her arms and legs, straightened herself, then dropped into a combat stance and looked him in the eye with a feral grin. When she charged again, it was with far greater speed and maneuverability than she'd used in her admittedly swift initial attack, and Dillon faltered as he jumped and backflipped desperately, trying to keep his opponent at a distance until she'd exhausted the bonus he'd accidentally bestowed on her.

To his detriment, the arena was a finite space, and he soon found his back to the wall. Reversing directions, Dillon managed to vault himself over Nora's forward hammer swing and relatively low head, but before his feet could touch the ground behind her, a spiderweb of pain shot across his back as her hammer connected and, with the contact blast of a pink grenade, cast him halfway back across the arena.

He landed on his back, Taran-Nuada falling from his grip as he bounced across the floor. He reached forward to snag it by the barrel end and scrambled to his feet, swinging his weapon into a broad, horizontal grip that he thrust up and forward just in time to block a descending hammer strike. His weapon held, thank Dust, and the maneuver saved his Aura, but the force of the impact knocked both combatants backward onto their rears. Dillon rolled with the transfer of momentum and swung his staff around to fire a barrage of fire-Dust rounds in Nora's direction. A few of the shots landed, forcing the grenadier off balance and eating into her Aura, but she blocked the last few with her hammer, collapsed it into its ranged form, and retaliated.

Dillon raced the explosions clockwise around the room, circling until he was too close to Nora to stay ahead of her shots, then charged and threw himself skyward. He landed behind her and just out of reach of her hammer, the reach of which he quickly threw himself inside before landing consecutive blow with the gun end of Taran-Nuada to Nora's head and stomach. The second shot blew her off her feet, but she recovered before he could reposition himself to follow through, and a volley of pink grenades—they had hearts on them, he realized—carried him across the arena and pummeled his Aura into the red.

It had been the closest match of the day, which he supposed was some consolation, but little could assuage the sense of abject failure conferred by Goodwitch's disappointed gaze. Her admonitions echoed through his head, _reckless, be careful, use your agility_ , as he wove his way back up to the stands. Aurora offered him an ironic fist-bump, and Willow a consolatory shrug-smile, both of which he accepted along with Nova's hug and quiet "Good effort. Never seen anything quite like that before," with its unstated implication that failure was acceptable in the face of such an unforeseeable reversal. Dillon shook his head to himself and refocused as Goodwitch announced the next pair; it would simply be up to him that it never happened again.

—

"And finally, Nova Aiolos and Yang Xiao Long."

Yang pumped her fist as she stood up, grinning and pointing in Nova's direction. "Oh, yeah! Get ready to _burned_ , kid!" she taunted, apparently heedless of the fact that Nova was, in point of fact, barely more than a year younger than her and substantially taller. Nova ignored the remark, remembering Dillon's story about the snowball fight that had rapidly degenerated when it had turned out that sufficiently packed snowballs could, in fact, affect Aura enough for Yang's recently-discovered Semblance to come into play. The Aiolos family had moved back to the mainland shortly thereafter, not long before Dillon started attending Fort Point, so Yang had never seen Nova's Semblance in person. True, the same held in reverse, but Nova could hope that, even if Yang had heard of his ability from Dillon, she would forget to plan around it in her alleged berserker rage.

Wary of the reach provided by Dillon's sword, Yang opted for a more tactical approach, firing off a series of blasts from her gauntlets. Nova ducked, jumped, and rolled to evade them, coming up with Sol Verdict in a reverse grip that allowed him to return the favor. Surprised, though not excessively so, Yang backflipped to avoid the salvo and fired again, forcing Nova to stop shooting in order to parry the blast with his blade. Attempting to capitalize on his distraction, Yang leapt into the air and fired at Nova from above, but he dove forward, evading the blast and leaving the brawler to land in closer proximity than he would have preferred. A lightning-fast series of cuts forced her back and deteriorated her Aura, but she responded by throwing herself into a blitz attack that Nova countered with a series of sword strikes, snap shots from Sol Verdict's hilt-gun, and finally a spinning kick to the middle that knocked her down and back.

A single hair drifted down to the floor between them.

Yang stood, saw the hair, and caught fire. Her eyes blazing red, heat pouring off her body, she bull-rushed Nova, who stood just steps behind that hair, unmoving.

Moments before Yang's fist made contact with Nova's face, he, too, caught fire. His Aura erupted in a blaze of light as brilliant as his namesake celestial phenomenon, he shifted his right foot back and dropped his center of gravity as he collapsed and stored Sol Verdict, and he caught Yang's right fist in his own right hand. Her left arm followed through, landing a punch to his gut that didn't cause a dent in his overcharged Aura, and he grabbed that arm, too. Then he switched his feet, hauling Yang into the air, swinging her around his head, and slamming her down into the floor. Without pausing, he hefted Yang into the air, released her, and drove his fist into her falling form, releasing a blinding flash as the girl was launched across the arena, where her rough landing finally depleted her Aura enough to end the match.

The burning glow around Nova faded, too, and he leaned over a little, placing his hands on his thighs for support as he felt his excess energy dissipate, leaving him at between half and a third of his optimal Aura level.

Yang struggled to her feet, eyes still smoldering, as Goodwitch brought up the bleacher lights and entered the area, a careful eye on the angry brawler. Nova understood; Yang was probably about as used to defeat as he himself was, and channeling that sort of rage would make losing especially hard. She jabbed a finger at him as she rearranged her hair protectively with her free hand.

"You—"

He interrupted before Goodwitch could, raising his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "Hey, I'm sorry. It was an accident, okay? I promise, it won't happen again."

"It had better not. You got lucky this time, and I don't hold well with people who mess with my hair, okay?"

"Miss Xiao Long, if you are quite finished," Goodwitch interrupted. "Thank you. Do try to control that temper of yours in the future, rather than allowing it to control you. It may be your secret weapon, but a weapon is useless if it cannot be directed appropriately. Mr. Aiolos, that was a fine performance, but do be careful. Your Semblance could get you into far more trouble than it might possibly get you out of if you misjudge your opponent. You are both dismissed."

Turning to the class, she continued, "That will be all for today. Continue to show up to class prepared to engage in combat, and be sure to train on your own time. Class dismissed."

—

Dillon sat on the roof of the dorms, balanced atop the ridge, his thoughts schooled to a careful silence. The wind moved around him softly, and he almost wished he could will it into a greater cacophony, but, his actual abilities aside, that was not why he was there. Nora Valkyrie was. He had known, logically, that every weapon could be countered—and every countermeasure, in turn, overcome—but he had been far too slow to adapt when his signature moves had played right into her hands. Overpowering strength delivered with reasonable speed: that combination was difficult to counter, except with even greater strength and speed, and the source of Dillon's strength became a weakness when he fought Nora. Some things reason alone could not conquer; perhaps victory would come only with experience and will.

"Dillon?"

It wasn't Nova, nor was it Aurora or even Willow, but the voice was familiar. Lie Ren. Curious. He opened his eyes and looked down at the lower roof, where the green-jacketed student Huntsman stood, looking up at him. Uncrossing his legs, Dillon swung himself entirely over to the left side of the roof and slid down.

"Hey, Ren," he greeted as he dropped to the ground. "What's up?"

Ren didn't answer the question directly, instead appraising Dillon carefully, as though searching for broken bones. Dillon supposed it was a reasonable fear. "I didn't know you meditated," Ren said instead.

Dillon shrugged. "I had to learn in order to master my Semblance. The Storm is a fickle thing; we even have a motto, of sorts."

"We?"  
"People with my Semblance. It's… almost a tradition in my family. It's not passed down unerringly, but it only ever skips a generation, at most, without someone coming along who throws lightning. 'Harmony within, hurricane without,' we say. It's the only way to channel that much destructive power without succumbing to a blind rage, the way Yang does."

Ren nodded. "That makes sense," he granted, turning to look out at the setting sun. "I have yet to master my own Semblance, although I admit it's more nebulous as well as less powerful than yours."

Dillon laughed, moving up beside his classmate. "Hey, don't ever underestimate the power of poor definitions. But I take it yours is more passive than mine?"

Another nod. A thought struck Dillon.

"Where did you say you were from, again?"

"I didn't," Ren replied, quietly. "A village near Mistral."

"Ah. I'd heard—never mind. Let's go in, I'm sure it's time to head down for dinner by now. Besides, I need to do the rest of the reading for history. By the way, any tips for fighting Nora?"

The emerald ninja merely smiled. "Don't."

Dillon sighed and waved in parting as they turned away to enter their respective rooms. All was quiet in DAWN's dorm: Aurora, using her jacket to augment her pillow, was lying on her bed with her face concealed by her copy of Erythrou Iskios's _The Great War: Causes, Conflagration, and Consequences_ , while Nova was sprawled sideways across both his and Dillon's beds, headphones on, doing something presumably productive on his Scroll, and Willow, lone among them, sat at one of the room's actual desks, poring over a textbook of her own. The moment the door closed behind him, however, that silence was broken as Willow slammed her book shut, wincing at the noise, and shot to her feet.

"Alright, you're back! Who's ready for dinner?"

Nova mumbled something unintelligible, while Aurora raised her arm and requested a minute to finish reading. Dillon raised his eyebrow.

"How are you hungry?" he asked, looking askance at the shortest member of the team. "It's only been…"

"Three and a half hours since classes ended," Nova supplied, moving one headphone halfway off its ear. "Six and a half since we finished lunch, which was _before_ we all had combat class and your extra training session. And an hour and a half since you went up to commune with the eagles or whatever."

Dillon was surprised; not only had he been longer than he'd intended to be, he hadn't even realized how much time he'd spent meditating after the fact.

Aurora slipped a bookmark into her volume and folded herself off the bed, swinging her jacket on with a movement that made her partner think of a cat transforming into a Mistralian matador. "Alright, let's go."

"Nova?" Dillon asked, trying to raise his voice enough to be heard without coming across as rude.

His brother sighed and slipped off his headphones, pocketing his Scroll as he headed for the door.

* * *

Well, that was interesting. I hope I made Yang's defeat come off convincingly; Nova's Semblance turns out to be pretty much tailor-made to counter hers (not intentionally, I swear!), and I wanted to get it a good showing sooner than later. I've also fixed the dropping of the title, header, and notes to the Aurora trailer and fixed my formatting inconsistencies.

Next couple chapters will have DAWN interacting with RWBY and especially JNPR in more general circumstances as we head into the Jaundice arc. Looks like my update streak is nuked, but that's what finals will do to you. Overall, though, the plot is starting to happen! Let's see if I can keep things interesting without a ton of pointless character death (I think I'll be just fine).


	10. Jaundice

Chapter 6. Jaundice

* * *

"Asking for help can be difficult. But refusing help you need when it's offered by your friends isn't noble, it's placing your own self-image above your ability to help them in combat. You're a team. Act like it."

—Professor Argente Takanome, reprimanding a student at Shade Academy

* * *

Dillon deflected Jaune's sword with the bladed end of Taran-Nuada, spinning the other boy to his off side as Dillon stepped to his left, bringing the gun end of his weapon around to crack Jaune in the back of the head. The swordsman staggered back, regaining a few paces of distance and bringing his shield up into a guard position, or, rather, a rough approximation of one.

"Come on, Jaune, you can do better!" Dillon called, dropping into a guard stance of his own. It was pointless encouragement, since Jaune's Aura was already severely depleted while Dillon's remained untouched, but Dillon saw no point in simply exploiting his fellow team leader's obvious lack of training without trying to help Jaune improve.

"Keep your shield up, square your feet! Anything I can see, I can try to hit."

Jaune glanced down at his feet and corrected his stance partway, then looked back toward Dillon and raised his shield to actually cover his body. Dillon charged and, pulsing his Semblance, executed a soaring flip to land facing Jaune's back and fire off a triple shot with Taran-Nuada that sent the knight tumbling forward, head over heels. Jaune's Aura dropped into the red, and Goodwitch called the match.

"An excellent showing, Mr. Aiolos, and an admirable show of sportsmanship and restraint. Mr. Arc isn't the only one who could learn something from you," Goodwitch congratulated, pausing to cast a moment's glance at Team CRDL, "but if you wish to help Mr. Arc in improving his abilities, I do ask that you do it on your own time, and not during a match in my class. Understood?"

"Yes, Professor." Dillon nodded. "I'll see what we can do."

"Please do, both of you. Mr. Arc, your inability to adapt to a higher level of combat is becoming a serious concern. If you do not wish to seek help from your teammates, you would be well advised to take it from those who offer it to you." She turned to face the rest of the class. "That goes for all of you, whenever you face the trials that you inevitably will face during your time at this academy. And remember, everyone," she continued in a brighter tone, "the Vytal Festival is only a few months away. It won't be long before students from the other kingdoms start arriving in Vale, so keep practicing! Those of you who choose to compete in the tournament will be representing all of Vale."

The bell rang, and Goodwitch walked off as Dillon turned to offer Jaune a hand up from the floor. The knight, however, took no notice until Dillon forcibly took hold of his arm and hoisted him to his feet.

"Cheer up, Jaune, you made a pretty good effort today! Come on, let's make sure our teams can all grab seats together!"

Thanks to the varying extracurricular-training philosophies of Ruby, Jaune, and Dillon, the three teams weren't often able to sit together for breakfast and dinner, which in Dillon's view made their lunchtime congress even more valuable. Today, though, Jaune appeared to be of a different opinion. The swordsman didn't resist as Dillon steered him toward their friends, but neither did he seem to take any part in the excitement that had bubbled up at Goodwitch's mention of the tournament, nor even in the general enthusiasm at being released from class for an hour. Given what had just transpired, it wasn't hard to guess why, but Dillon was at a loss as to how he might help his friend.

Of course, he reflected with a grimace as they entered the dining hall, Cardin Winchester probably had at least as much to do with Jaune's troubles as Jaune's actual shortcomings did. Dillon hadn't appreciated Cardin's attitude when he first encountered the Briar Hall graduate, nor did any of their subsequent interactions improve on that impression, as Weiss's capable and almost laboriously semi-considerate conduct during and after Initiation had done for his view of the heiress. Unlike the fencer, who generally considered her privileged name a badge of the standards she considered herself bound to attain, Cardin appeared to consider himself the highest being in Beacon and his momentary, callous sense of amusement the highest cause, and he wore his prejudices like an invisible, spike-covered second set of armor. Despite his aggressive disdain for faunus, however, he seemed to love tormenting Jaune Arc more than anything else, and Jaune's social awkwardness and physical ineptitude combined to make Cardin's efforts both easy and damaging. Dillon had hoped that coaching Jaune into a decent showing in combat class might help begin to restore some of the knight's confidence—not to mention his work ethic—but as JNPR's leader picked disconsolately at his lunch, Dillon needed no words to see that his efforts had failed.

"Look, Jaune, that wasn't the best time or place, and if it felt like I was embarrassing you, I apologize," Dillon tried, extending a hand loosely toward the knight as they sat down at the table. "Besides, you hardly had a chance to put what I was saying into practice. If you'd like, we could meet in the training rooms after classes, or I'm sure your teammates would be happy to help you train and study. There's no shame in starting off slow, only in not trying to catch up."

Nova and Aurora slid in opposite Dillon as Jaune did his best to shrug off the concern, and when Willow arrived with Ren and Nora, depositing herself across from Nova as the hammer-wielder launched into a fantastical story, the discussion was briefly forgotten. Soon enough, however, Nora had exhausted the potential of her tale of Ursawolves and imaginary carpet fortunes, and the eleven assembled students turned their attention to their twelfth fellow, who was turned slightly away and clearly suffering from an excess of consciousness.

"You look kind of… not okay," Ruby replied when Jaune insisted on the contrary. It was perhaps not the most tactful response, but a burst of mocking laughter from the next table cut off any contrary speech. It was Team CRDL, naturally, and they had surrounded a rabbit faunus Dillion thought he recognized as a second-year student.

"Jaune, Cardin has been bullying you since the first week of school," Pyrrha pointed out, while Dillon remained focused on CRDL and the faunus girl. Four against one was difficult odds, even for a second-year, after all.

"Who? Cardin Winchester?" Jaune asked with poorly faked bemusement. "He just likes to mess around, you know? Practical jokes." Dillon stifled a laugh, and Aurora made a sort of choking noise.

"He's a bully," Ruby corrected the knight.

"Oh, please. Name one time he's 'bullied' me," Jaune tried again, with air quotes.

"He stuffed you in a rocket locker during orientation, and that was the start of it," Dillon pointed out. Jaune shrugged defensively.

"I didn't land far from the school…"  
"Jaune," Pyrrha pressed him, "you know if you ever need help, you can just ask."

Dillion sighed in a way that sounded suspiciously like "I just tried that twenty minutes ago, but good luck."

"Ooh, I know!" Nora exclaimed, jumping to her feet and pumping her arms for emphasis. "We'll _break his legs!_ "

Dillon, though he liked the idea, facepalmed. Jaune continued having none of his friends' determination to help him out of his pit, and picked up his tray of half-eaten food.

"Guys, really, it's fine," he lied again. "Besides, it's not like he's only a jerk to me, he's a jerk to everyone."  
Which, Dillon reflected for the millionth time, was what made Cardin Winchester a truly despicable being. As if to prove his point, a cry sounded from the direction of the said bully: apparently the "jerk" and his goons had tired of simply mocking and trying to intimidate the faunus girl and instead gone for yanking her ears.

"I can't stand people like him," Pyrrha groused as they watched. No one, however, moved to interfere.

Until a dinner knife slammed into the table next to Cardin's arm. He shrieked and let go of the girl, who recoiled both from his grip and the sudden appearance of the deadly weapon.

"Sorry!" Dillon called out, not sounding sorry in the least, as he stood up and walked over to retrieve the errant utensil. "Really tough steak today."

With a single, smooth motion, the vegetarian withdrew the knife from the table. Flipping it in his hand with casual ease, he looked intently at Cardin. "Maybe don't bully the upperclassmen, right, genius? Or, you know, don't bully people at all, because that's not really what people look for in their glorious defenders. And it's obnoxious, disgusting, pathetic, and vile."

The faunus had vanished, so Dillon simply turned and walked back to his friends, noting with disappointment as Jaune, shoulders slumped and slumping further, walked by.

—

" _This_ is prior to the Faunus Rights Revolution, more popularly known as the Faunus War!" Professor Oobleck exclaimed as he dashed around the front of the classroom, almost appearing to teleport from one point to another. Aurora cast another doubtful look at Jaune's snoring form in the row ahead of her before returning to her notes, trying to keep up with the hyperactive professor's lecturing while extracting and recording his key points. Aurora usually loved history, but Oobleck nearly Atlesian in his focus on "the facts of what happened," if not in his absolute intolerance of prejudice and revisionism. Art and rhetoric and motivations were what made history come _alive_ , but it seemed she would have to settle for bullet points as far as class was concerned.

"Humankind," Oobleck continued at his breakneck pace, "was quite, quite _adamant_ about centralizing the Faunus population in Menagerie. Now, while this may feel like ancient history to some of you, it is imperative to remember that these are relatively _recent_ events! Why, the repercussions of the uprising can still be seen to this day! Now! Have any among you been subjugated or discriminated against because of your Faunus heritage?"

The question struck Aurora as a somewhat trite and a remarkably personal one, and it wasn't only the subtlety of her slit pupils that made her stay her hand. Blake, she was unsurprised to see, didn't react either: outing herself would rather defeat the purpose of that little black bow, as thin a disguise as that was. The rabbit-eared girl from the cafeteria, though it took her a moment, joined the scattered few who did identify themselves.

"Dreadful! Simply dreadful!" Oobleck exclaimed, shaking his head. "Remember, students, it is _precisely_ this kind of ignorance that breeds violence! I mean, I mean, look at what happened to the White Fang!" Aurora winced at the mention of the violent former rights group. It was, simply put, a sensitive subject among Faunus. Heedless, perhaps because he spoke too quickly for such caution, Oobleck continued: "Now, which one of you young scallions can tell me what many theorize to be the turning point in the third year of the war?"

Weiss raised her hand first, and Oobleck called on her instantly. "The Battle of Fort Castle!" the heiress stated, appearing extremely pleased with herself.

"Precisely! And who can tell me the advantage the Faunus had over General Lagune's forces?"

Aurora raised her hand, but Cardin Winchester chose that moment to flick a wad of paper at the back of Jaune Arc's head, startling the sleeping idiot so that he awoke with a yelp. Oobleck was on him instantly, and Aurora could only cringe at his stammering, and Pyrrha Nikos's entirely unsubtle, entirely pointless efforts to mime the answer. Her own night vision was a touch better than that of most Faunus thanks to her peculiar trait. At least Cardin got his comeuppance, as Oobleck turned to him and the brainless bully promptly forces Aurora to restrain herself from reaching over the seats and throttling Winchester where he sat until Pyrrha's voice cut through the fog of her fury.

"No, I have the answer. It's night vision. Many Faunus are known to have nearly-perfect sight in the dark."

Without waiting to be called on, or for Cardin to make another snide and racist remark, Blake cut in. "General Lagune was inexperienced, and made the mistake of trying to ambush the Faunus in their sleep. His massive army was outmatched, and the general was captured."

Aurora decided to join in herself, and added, "Of course, even eighty years ago, there were ways to counteract the Faunus's natural advantage, but Lagune assumed that his opponents were inherently inferior, and failed to plan for contingencies, like losing the element of surprise. Pearse's sentries woke the camp, at which point the battle was effectively over."

Blake got the last word in, jibing, "Perhaps if he'd paid attention in class, he wouldn't have been remembered as such a _failure_."

Cardin stood, up, fists clenched, but Oobleck had had more than enough of his bigotry and disruptiveness, and with a few sharp words he had Cardin mimicking Jaune's dejected slouch while the professor continued with his lightspeed lecture.

"I don't know how either of them got in here," Aurora muttered to her team, half an hour later, as they filtered out of Oobleck's classroom.

"Jaune and Cardin?" Dillon asked, rhetorically. "No idea about the first. He doesn't have experience, and he's got something to prove in a way that's keeping him from doing any of the things he'd need to do if he actually wanted to become a decent Huntsman. Cardin—well, Cardin's from an old family. He's a racist and a bully, but he does have ability. The world needs defenders, and if some of them aren't exactly ideal people, well, who cares as long as we keep the kingdoms safe from the monsters outside?"

"Never mind the monsters inside," Willow griped. "Let's all just pretend those don't exist, huh?"

"None of us like it," Aurora rejoined. "And I'm not saying I don't plan to kick Cardin's ass someday. Or several days. But overall the best thing for us to do is put forth our best, stand up for what's right, and let people like him either climb up to our level and learn mutual respect, or else fall away and go back to being a farmer somewhere." She glanced at her fingers. "Not that there's anything wrong with _being_ a farmer, but as a fallback plan…"

"It's not exactly glamorous," Nova supplied. "And I can think of very few people that would sting more."

The team laughed together and headed for the lockers, ready to spar and practice techniques before retiring to homework and dinner.

"Nice speech, by the way," Dillon nodded to Aurora as they walked. "I think maybe Ozpin should've made you leader."  
Aurora laughed again and shrugged. "I blame our initials," she joked, adding, "Besides, it's not like that stopped you from deputizing me." Indeed, the Vacuan often found herself acting as her partner's second in matters of planning and team discipline, their similar priorities and differing approaches allowing the two to overcome their teammates' recalcitrance more effectively than if Dillon were to steer the team alone. They reached the locker room, and Aurora joyfully disappeared into the adjacent bathrooms to replace her uniform—it could have been an extremely classy ensemble, but of course someone had to come along and cut it like this was some sort of knockoff Mistralian cartoon—with her combat outfit.

She twirled her weapons, shifting them back and forth between pistol and truncheon modes, as she headed for the training floors, attempting to clear her mind of the stresses and trivialities of the day. Two things, however, stayed stuck: as usual, the knowledge that she had yet to land a blow on, much less defeat, Pyrrha Nikos in a sparring session; and Professor Oobleck's mention of the White Fang during class.

The White Fang were violent, certainly, but it wasn't mere ignorance that had made them that way, nor was it even the violence of human supremacists like Cardin Winchester. Diamond Pearse and Ghira Belladonna had possessed a vision, but that vision had come under attack, repeatedly and from within: first with Pearse's assassination, then after the elder Belladonna's retirement. Even the peaceful branch of the Fang had never been particularly active in Vacuo, but Aurora and every other Faunus in the kingdom had followed the news from abroad with concern when the protest organization rapidly turned violent. It had been some time since the most flagrant atrocities, and years since the mysterious destruction of the village of Troas, north of Vale, but Aurora was suddenly reminded that she was living in a kingdom where political violence, at least on the news, was almost a daily occurrence.

As for Pyrrha, well, the Mistralian was a nice girl, almost conscientiously unprejudiced and loyal to a fault, but her air of untouchability rankled Aurora. She was no stranger to taking hits and even losses, but the idea of being so completely outclassed—by someone her own age, with so similar a life—felt irritating, and Aurora knew that, in order to give Pyrrha her due, she would first have to prove that she could best her fellow champion. Thus resolved, she holstered her weapons, deciding, for the moment, to practice and improve her Semblance. Nova, it appeared, was doing the same, while their partners set up to spar.

* * *

Well, that was an inexcusably long break. I had the steak knife scene written ages ago, but couldn't bring myself to go rewatch the episodes and remind myself how things unfolded.

Argente Takanome is another OC (named for the color silver and a Destiny way-back-story character), and she'll show up eventually in-story—probably when I get to late V3/V4. Speaking of minor OCs, who remembers where Diamond Pearse first showed up? And on _that_ topic, yes, Aurora's a cat Faunus. It was supposed to be part of her design from the beginning, but I couldn't figure out a trait that I liked. No one appeared to notice either because they didn't think it was a big enough deal to comment on, or because, like myself IRL, they don't pay that much attention to people's eyes.

Briar Hall (an allusion to Russell's combat school in the fanfic "Darkling Thrush") is the third of the three Vale-area combat schools in this universe, along with Fort Point (which is more of a middle/high school with a robust elective combat program) and Signal, and it's easily the most... Cardin-esque of the three.

Next up: Forever Fall, and the further development of Aurora's rivalry issues. With any luck, it won't take quite so long.


	11. Forever Fall

7\. Forever Fall

* * *

"The best part about sticking to the shadows is people can only push you away if they know you're trying to be helpful."

—Qrow Branwen

* * *

Willow sighed deeply and shut her textbook, resting her head on top of the five-hundred-plus-page _Tanner Haywood's Complete Grimm Compendium_ , her scribble-marked essay draft stacked beside her head.

"I spent three years in the wilds," she complained to the room. "This should not be as hard as it is."

"Maybe you got so used to a particular kind of insanity that all the others that are out there seem weirder than they do if you're relatively new to all of them," Nova suggested, not glancing up from his own essay. Dillon had been right, back on the airship, she reflected: her partner really was as much an academic workhorse as he was a tank on the battlefield. "Anyways, what do you mean you were in the wilds for three years?"

Willow sighed again, turning to another essay as she thought through her answer. "My village was attacked," she said at last. "White Fang. Everyone else… everyone else died. A Huntsman found me, and he helped me get back what they'd stolen—but then he betrayed me, took it for himself and his employers, and dumped me on a transport to Vale. The school year started in not that long, so I applied last-minute to Beacon and Professor Ozpin gave me a spot."

"Wow. That's a story," Nova said, putting his pen down to look at her. "All I did was apply early. But no, that doesn't sound the same as hunting Grimm. I can take a look at that later, if you want. Right now I'm going to turn in—we've got the field trip tomorrow morning and I want to go over Verdict before we have to head out."

"That's fair," Willow nodded. "I should probably do the same with my guns. I think I'll take a walk first, though. Do you want to come? I have no idea where Dillon and Aurora have gotten, and they aren't exactly subtle, so…."

Nova shook his head. "Dillon and I will just end up staying awake an hour longer than we should debating poetry or combat tactics or something, and I'm used to sleeping with a light on."

Oh, well, Willow thought; it made a sort of sense that her partner wouldn't take note of his brother's or his brother's partner's romantic hopes and dreams. Besides, the two in question would make much better targets, if she could find them. There would be opportunities to venture into Vale proper rather soon: maybe she could orchestrate something then, with or without the help of Yang and Nora. She shook her head, looking back at the shadowy figures stenciled on the cover of _Haywood's Compendium_.

"Alright, then," she said, turning again to her partner. "See you tomorrow, Skyburner."

Nova laughed and answered with a soft-spoken comment about hoping not to burn down Forever Fall as Willow slipped her Scroll into her pocket and shifted sideways out the door.

Ruby and Jaune sat beside one another, slouched against the wall next to JNPR's door. Well, Jaune was slumped against the door, while Ruby sat against the wall, beside him.

"Oh, uh… hey, guys. You okay?" Jaune certainly didn't look like he was in top form, but Ruby nodded happily, even giving Willow a small wave as the diminutive girl popped to her feet.

"We're fine, yeah! I was just helping Jaune figure out some stuff. Leader things, you know? Not all of us were expecting… all of this when we came to Beacon. Not all of us are Dillon, you know?"

Willow bit back a smirk, smiling gently instead. Her respect for her friend and team leader had never blinded her to the tightrope of improvisation, humor, and high standards—for himself and all of his teammates—that Dillon used to stay above water. "Well, as I'm sure he would say, we do the best we can with what we have. That's why we're here, after all."

Ruby smiled. "I like that. Hey, Jaune! We should all get together on the weekends and have, like, a secret society of team leaders! It'd be awesome!"

Jaune's smile was wan but present. "That would be a lot of fun, yeah," the knight agreed, nodding. "I'll… I'll see if I can make it."

"I think Dillon would really appreciate that," Willow told the leaders. "We're all friends, but he tries really hard to always stay the sort of person who can take command if he has to. Honestly we don't make it that easy on him, but the point is having a definite time to hang out with people he doesn't feel responsible for—at least directly—that should be good for him."

"It'll be good for all of us, I think," Ruby responded. "Good night, guys—and remember, Jaune: you can't be a failure anymore. Good night, you two." The door to Team RWBY's room swung shut.

"Good night, Jaune," Willow echoed. "Unless you want to go for a walk right now?"

Jaune shook his head. "Thanks, but I—I should get back to my team. I have a lot to make up for right now," he told her. Willow nodded.

"Alright, well… good luck. And good night. I'll see you all at the bullhead tomorrow." Willow waved and turned to walk down the hallway. She heard JNPR's door creak open behind her, but then Jaune's scroll began ringing, and, as she turned the corner, Willow caught the abrasive tones of Cardin Winchester filtering over the speakers.

She paused, then continued walking. Confronting Jaune wouldn't help things: even before Cardin had begun leading Jaune around like a cowed puppy, the knight had pushed away all efforts to help him. Willow privately suspected that pushing away his team had done more than simply leave Jaune vulnerable, but she also knew that whatever JNPR's leader was dealing with, he would insist—and, at this stage, probably had to—get past it on his own.

* * *

Forever Fall certainly lived up to its name. Nova had seen it before, of course—one didn't simply live in the city of Vale itself and never even look at the remarkable expanse of woodland to its northern edge—but he'd never been nearly so far in. He glanced at Willow and caught a curious expression on his partner's face, her hand that wasn't holding a sap jar hovering near her weapons. Nova, per Ren's request, was carrying several extra jars for the twin purposes of acquiring enough extra syrup to distract Nora and acquiring enough additional extra sap to bring back and use as syrup on pancakes for RWBY, JNPR, and DAWN. Whether both were possible was a question concerning which everyone involved was healthily skeptical.

Jaune, loaded down with a large cardboard box and five syrup jars, straggled like a kicked puppy after Team CRDL once Goodwitch dismissed the students to wander the forest in pursuit of sap. Trading concerned glances at the obviously struggling team leader—as they'd been doing for weeks—Nova, his team, and their seven remaining friends spread out conically through the woods ahead, keeping close enough to see and hear each other easily without tripping over one another's taps.

Gathering the sap was almost surprisingly easy, and the reddish liquid flowed more easily than Nova had expected from the incisions they made near the bottoms of the crimson-leaved trees. He put the last spare jar back in the box and taped the lid shut, glancing over to where Pyrrha and Ren were sighing as Nora emptied yet another jar of sap. Nova hefted the box—it was heavy, but nothing he couldn't handle—and leaned against a tree, taking a moment to enjoy the stillness of the crimson woods.

Blake turned sharply, looking past Nova up the nearby rise. He followed her gaze, but saw nothing. He looked back, a questioning expression on his face, and she shrugged.

"I thought I heard—never mind," she said, turning back to her sap jar.

Nova glanced up the hill again, shrugged, and went back to contentedly surveying the glade. Nora, once again draining a jar Ren had only just set to the side, caught his eye, and he looked down at his own box, paused, shrugged again, and picked up a jar.

The liquid inside was lightish-red, almost the color of cherry blossoms, and diffused the sunlight in a way that made Nova feel like it should have been translucent despite its total opacity. He unscrewed the lid and sniffed the incongruously dark-sweet odor, then tilted his head back and let a little fall into his mouth.

Darn, that was something. The sap was a common commodity in Vale, but it invariably lost a little something on the journey from tree trunk to store shelf, meaning that there was nothing in the world quite comparable to fresh-tapped sap from Forever Fall. He screwed the lid back on to forestall temptation and replaced the jar in his box, but no sooner had he done so than a bone-chilling roar trembled the forest.

His teammates, RWBY, and NPR were on alert in an instant, weapons at the ready and sap jars firmly sealed to avoid attracting any more Grimm than had, evidently, already been summoned. He locked eyes with his brother and nodded. Willow was at his side in moments, falling back to circle around the low cliff as Dillon and Aurora filtered further out through the trees, scouting the perimeter toward the opposite end of the rise.

They hadn't gone far when Sky Lark and Dove Bronzewing blew past them in a panic, the latter crashing headlong into Yang, who seized him by his collar and demanded answers.

"Back there! It's got Cardin!"

All eleven of them froze. Pyrrha dropped her sap jar. "Jaune!"

Ruby reacted first. "Yang! You and Blake go get Professor Goodwitch."

"Ren, Nora, go with them," Pyrrha ordered. "There could be more."

"Ruby, you take Weiss and Pyrrha that way!" Dillon called. "Nova, Willow, screen their flank! Aurora and I will circle around as fast as possible and fall back shooting if we find more. Let's go!"

Sword in hand and with his partner beside him, Nova plunged through the sparse brush as fast as he could while keeping an eye out for approaching threats. They met nothing, though, and moments later he and Willow followed Pyrrha, Weiss, and Ruby to the edge of the clearing that sat just atop the bluff overlooking where they'd been tapping trees.

Cardin Winchester was in a bad way, but Jaune had managed to get himself into worse. The bullying leader of Team CRDL lay disarmed on the ground, his aura intact but his strength apparently exhausted, an Ursa larger than a small house looming over him. As the beast prepared to strike, Jaune threw himself into the path of its claw, catching the blow on his shield. He lacked the training to counterattack effectively, though, and so simply stood as best he could while the Grimm slowly forced the shield aside.

Nova readied Sol Verdict, prepared to burn the monster to explosive death, but Pyrrha called, "Wait!"

Weiss and Willow stood down as well, equally confused, before Jaune emerged from beneath his shield to land a palpable strike across the Ursa's neck. The beast recoiled, but was not finished, and Jaune dodged only a handful of sweeping, clawed, hammer-palmed blows before his lack of coordination manifested itself and he rolled across the clearing. The erstwhile swordsman regained his feet quickly and charged again, but now he was only swinging wildly, and the Grimm sent him sailing across the clearing on his next pass. This time he took longer to rise, and Nova didn't need to see the aura monitor that Jaune checked to guess that the crusader didn't have much more left in him.

The Ursa galloped towards the knight, roaring, and Jaune charged in response, though this time, thankfully, he kept his feet on the ground. As he made to swing, his shield fell, exposing his side to the Ursa's much more powerful incoming blow. But before Nova could act, he caught Pyrrha's outstretched hand and watched as Jaune's shield righted itself, moving apparently of its own accord to block the monster's strike and give the knight the opening he needed to reach up at close range and slice the beast's head clean off.

"Uh, what?" Ruby asked, scratching her head, as Pyrrha lowered her arm.

"How did you…" Weiss trailed off.

Nova tuned out the girls as Pyrrha explained her Semblance and Ruby failed to understand. He caught Dillon's eye across the clearing and signaled his understanding of the plan, then turned with Willow as Pyrrha moved to leave her partner to his newfound confidence.

"Wait, where are you going?" Nova sighed. Weiss may have had the best education money could buy, but there were simple precepts of psychology in which she had apparently never been trained.

"Yeah, we gotta tell them what happened!" Ruby was adorable, like a small kitten with preternatural engineering talents, but she lacked much in the way of intuition when it came to people.

"Jaune needs this," Willow broke in, "and frankly, having Cardin believe that Jaune isn't as weak as he thought could be just as consequential as Jaune's believing the same thing."

"Such was the wisdom of Scamandrion, who spent the lies of his treasury well," Nova recited. He received four odd looks in various shades of bemusement and incomprehension. "What? Have none of you read the _Song of Xanthe_ before?"

"Of course I have," Weiss replied haughtily. "It's a classic passage, from just before Mauros… oh."

Pyrrha smiled gently and looked into the clearing at her partner, who stood tall before the headless, dissolving carcass. "Exactly. Perhaps we can just keep this our little secret."

She turned and walked into the forest. Nova and Willow remained and watched as the knight helped Cardin to his feet. The two clasped hands, and Jaune leaned forcefully toward Cardin, paused a moment, and walked away.

"I'd call this a good day," Willow said with a smile. "Whatever was going on with those two, I think it's well and truly over. But come on: we'd better grab our syrup again before Nora drinks it all."

* * *

Finally, a wild update appears! (Full disclosure: I have never played Pokemon.) This was unbelievably hard to figure out how to write, but I think I ended up with a pretty good character chapter.

The real-life reference that Nova makes is to a webcomic called Erfworld (Book 2: Love is a Battlefield): "Such was the currency of the king of Jetstone, and Slately spent his lies well" in telling his son that he had faith in his ability to defend the city.

Next chapter will bring some of DAWN's own brewing issues to the fore, and will conclude the spring semester arc, after which it will be... "Time to Say Goodbye." Sorry, that didn't work at all. See you next time!


	12. Glass and Shadows

8\. Glass and Shadows

* * *

"Things are hardly ever what they appear, and it is of paramount importance to the future that this come to be recognized as not only true but good." —From _The Picture of Tyrian Stone_ , by Mistralian satirist Oliver Wing

* * *

"So, you know Pyrrha's Semblance is polarity, right?" Willow asked as she flopped down on her bed. Dillon paused abruptly, Aurora froze, and Nova quickly shoved his extra syrup jars onto a high shelf before unfolding Sol Verdict to tip Aurora's floor-bound jar onto the sheets beside his partner.

"Huh," Dillon mused, while his teammates stared slack-jawed at Nova's dexterity and Willow's revelation. He was used to such displays from his brother, though still occasionally surprised. That Pyrrha could control magnetic fields was less expected, but not, on consideration, especially surprising.

Aurora finally turned away from her miraculously intact syrup jar and narrowed her eyes. "That little… cheat!" she exclaimed, gesturing sharply. "It's not skill, she just doesn't _let_ anyone hit her!"

"Good use of your Semblance isn't a cheat," Dillon pointed out. "None of us would have guessed she could do that on our own. And remember, Nova and I won and lost the first bouts we fought here, respectively, because his Semblance is pretty ideally suited to nullifying Yang's, and Nora is basically the anti-me. It's not about balance, it's about using what you have as effectively as you can." He refrained from pointing out that Aurora's own, flashier Semblance could prevent her enemies from attacking at range or even repositioning.

"But you beat Nora last week!"

"Because my fighting style, while heavily augmented by my Semblance, isn't dependent on it," he answered, sitting on his own bed. "I restricted my use of my Semblance to boosting my agility, and used fire Dust and my blade to deal damage. Yang still hasn't beaten Nova because she's over-reliant on brute-forcing her opponents into submission, and Nova's Semblance lets him tank freaking cannon fire if he times it right. He's yet to beat Ren, you notice. Pyrrha has a lot of tools at her disposal, so she's difficult to work around, too: she's agile, she's a good shot, and she's good at forcing her opponents into melee, where she's literally untouchable. And coincidentally, that plays into your weaknesses: you have ranged ability, but you prefer melee, and the way you use your Semblance is generally calculated to allow you to close safely."

Aurora picked up her jar and tossed it to Nova, who placed it on top of his box. "So what exactly are you saying I should do?" she sighed, leaning against the wall by the window. Even frustrated and reluctantly seeking advice, Dillon thought, she cut the figure of genuine badass.

He raised his hands in an expansive gesture. "Diversify. Work on your ability to do serious damage at range and on the move, and try to figure out a way to use your shards more offensively. If you can bring a non-metallic weapon to a fight with Pyrrha, that will give you a big advantage." Dillon shrugged his jacket off and turned to hang it up as his partner shoved off the wall. "Right now, I'm going to go help Ren make pancakes."

"I'll be there," Aurora said. "I'm heading to the practice hall first, though."

"You know it's eight-thirty already, right?" Willow asked. "I'm not sure I'll even be awake long enough for pancakes."

"I'd say we'll save some," Dillon promised, "but Nora will be there, so that probably won't happen." He bowed gracefully as he backed out the door, pausing a moment to appreciate the visual pun, before turning down the hall to the student kitchens.

Ren was already apron-clad and readying the sourdough mix when Dillon arrived, so the latecomer donned his own apron—a white, blue-trimmed garment bearing the same entreaty as his friend's—and reached for the egg box, grateful once more for the seemingly infinite supply of culinary resources at Beacon's disposal.

Dillon's teammates arrived precisely on time, although it appeared that Willow had been forced to drag Aurora from the training hall. Nova entered last, bearing the box of extra syrup jars. Ruby and Nora burst in moments later, having slipped from the grasps (literal or metaphorical, Dillon wasn't sure) of Blake and Yang under the siren call of sugar.

"Where's the rest of your team?" Dillon asked, glancing sideways at Ren as the two deposited their stacks of standard and Atlesian pancakes.

"Jaune's been off by himfelf finfe we got back," Nora answered around a mouthful of pancake, and Dillon allowed himself to be sincerely impressed at the shock absorber's speed at eating and enunciation while so doing. "Pyrrha went to go find him; they're probably up on the roof again by now. Should be back foon, vough."

As it turned out, the missing set of partners did not show up soon, but the assembled Hunters passed the time between themselves, examining Nova's VI until it started spamming an error message about cosmic annihilation and personal responsibility and he snatched it back in frustration, after which the subject turned to their various homelands and then, since Blake had fallen silent, to books, so that Dillon was on the verge of acquiescing to Ruby's puppy eyes and declaiming from _The Picture of Tyrian Stone_ when the door thumped open and the missing members of the party arrived.

"Hello, everyone!" Pyrrha exclaimed brightly. Jaune waved, clearly tired, but also carrying himself taller and with visibly more self-respect than he had in months, if not longer.

"So," Nora asked with visibly conspiratorial interest as the newcomers dropped into spaces that Dillon and Ren hastily ensured were available, "What's been keeping the two of you so late at night?"

Jaune sighed. "I… made a mistake a few weeks ago. I hurt Pyrrha, and I ended up hurting you, too," he answered, directing the latter part at Ren and Nora. "I wasn't the leader you needed me to be, and I'm sorry. But I ended things with Cardin in the forest today, and I finally took Pyrrha up on an offer she was a good enough partner to leave open. We've been working on my combat basics: stance, guard positions, basic cuts."

"We're in this together, after all," Pyrrha cut in. "And whatever mistakes we've made, your past doesn't define who you are. It just gives you the starting point for who you're going to be—and no matter who we all become, from now on, we're going to do it as a team."

"Aww!" Yang seemingly materialized behind the two to pull their heads toward one another and ruffle their hair. "Look at that, the kids are growing up!"

"You're seventeen, Yang." Blake gave voice to the nine deadpan stares that greeted the heavy hitter's antics. "And easily the least mature person in the room."

"And on that note," Dillon said, rising from his seat with most of the table's dishes, "I believe most of us should head to sleep. Team DAWN has an early run tomorrow, after all—"

"And we're all exhausted from getting up that early today," Aurora finished with a grin. Nova and Willow simply sighed, while RWBY shared looks of horror.

* * *

Willow blinked and turned over to keep the sun out of her eyes. Then she sat bolt upright, scrambling to get out of bed and prepare for class. Why hadn't anyone woken her when the team got up to run? Had they left her behind?

Nova was sound asleep against the opposite wall. Aurora breathed evenly, eyes closed and her body curled together around her sheets, in the bed beside Willow's. The door opened, and Dillon, neatly dressed in his dapper combat clothes, entered with a tray bearing coffee and a small selection of danishes.

"Help yourself," he grinned at her, waving at the tray as he set it down on the dressers against the window and drew out the chair from his desk. Willow stared at him. After a moment, he coughed discreetly and made an apologetic gesture, being careful not to jostle his mug as he added his trademark hazelnut creamer.

"Apologies if my laxity disturbed you," he began, pausing to sip his drink and sigh appreciatively. "Classes are off today—it's the summer solstice, plus early preparations for the Vytal Festival. I know, it's a long time in advance, but it only comes to Vale every four years, and there will be thousands of visitors from the other kingdoms. I thought we might take it easy and go tour the town. Don't worry," he added with a look of evil mischief, "we'll make up for it over the weekend. It wouldn't do to go soft just as the tournament preparations are getting underway, after all."

Willow had taken the opportunity during Dillon's explanation to help herself to coffee of her own, and sat down on the edge of her bed. "I'll pass, I think," she joked quietly as Aurora stirred behind her.

"Pass me some coffee, if you don't mind," the team deputy requested dryly. "You trying to butter us up for something, Dillon?"

Dillon placed a hand over his heart in mock offense. "Butter you up? Whyever would I want to do that?" He relaxed and shrugged as Willow hid a smirk. "Really, though, I only thought we might take this underrated holiday and take a tour of the city. It's been almost three months and the two of you have hardly seen how much our wonderful city has to offer, plus the first student arrivals from other kingdoms are due to arrive today."

Aurora rolled past Willow and vaulted smoothly from her own bed to the floor, picking up a cup of coffee and depositing it carefully on a star of shards while she selected a danish. Dillon tilted his head and nodded, impressed, and Aurora quickly picked up her mug before she could lose focus and send it crashing to the floor.

"What's the plan, then?" she asked, sitting down cross-legged dipping her pastry in her coffee. "Are we meeting up with RWBY or JNPR, or is this a DAWN-only bonding espionage mission?"

"Well, I saw RWBY heading for the air docks while I was getting coffee for you sleepyheads," Dillon said, interrupting himself to yawn and sip more coffee, "but if Nova decides to get up before noon we can probably drag JNPR along with us, at least as far as the city itself."

"That may be as far as we want to drag them," Willow agreed, nodding. "Ren's nice, and so are Jaune and Pyrrha, but Nora on break isn't something I want to deal with on short notice."

Nova chose that moment to stir, wrapping himself in sheets dramatically and establishing himself as a small, coffee-drinking mountain on the corner of Dillon's bed that abutted the dressers.

"No classes, for the solstice and the first Vytal Festival arrivals," Dillon explained in morning-speak. "Thought we might show Willow and Aurora around the city, maybe hang out with JNPR part of the time."

Nova grumbled and nodded in acquiescence, drained his coffee, and made for his closet. Willow raised an eyebrow.

"I thought I was the silent, grumpy one in the morning," she noted as the door swung shut behind her partner.

Dillon waved abstractly. "You're the one who groans about running. Nova's acclimated to that kind of regimen, so you only notice that he's like this when we actually take a morning off." He stood up and began gathering the empty coffee cups and saucers. "I'll return all this and try to stall JNPR if I see them. Next airship to the city is in fifteen minutes."

He slipped out the door, and Willow began the process of sliding her combat clothes on over her pajamas and extricating her sleepwear from beneath her clothes. By the time she finished lacing up her boots, Aurora was waiting by the door, busying herself with a few of her shards, which she appeared to be attempting to rotate, with a little success. As Willow stood up, the taller girl dissipated her shards with a sigh and opened the door.

They parted from JNPR shortly after landing, leaving their friends under the guidance of Nora's enthusiastic adventuring spirit and Jaune's still-halting leadership. As Nova had observed, Pyrrha and Ren would probably be able to prevent Nora from engaging them in any exceptionally dangerous activities. Flanking her partner, Aurora allowed the Aiolos siblings to escort her and Willow toward their favorite sections of Vale's commercial district.

Eventually, their meanderings brought them back toward the docks, where the welcoming banners and balloons suddenly ceased around a block at the center of which stood an empty storefront with shattered windows.

"Second shop this week," Nova related in low tones. "Robberies like this have been going on since before the semester started. Whoever it is leaves the money, but not a speck of Dust or a clue to their identity."

"I've heard," Willow added, nodding. Dillon and Aurora turned to face her and Nova as she continued. "Some people having been theorizing it's the White Fang. Speculating, really, but there's no other organization large enough to need that much Dust—but even given their size, I do _not_ want to know what terrorists like them could be planning to pull of with as much as they've got to be accumulating."

Aurora held up a hand, and Willow saw a tetrad of students, arrivals from Vacuo, wandering down the street. "Maybe we ought to reassure the arrivals that this isn't what Vale is usually like?" she suggested.

"I mean, it _has_ been happening frequently lately," Dillon noted, "but sure, let's go make friends and scope out the competition. And put in a good word for our kingdom, yeah."

The students were standing by the police tape as DAWN approached. The tallest member of the group was a blue-haired girl a little taller and wider than Aurora, and wore sneakers, blue-and-white high socks and athletic shorts, and a blue tank top that matched her hair, with a bladed weapon that resembled a hockey stick slung across her back to complete the amalgamated sportsball theme. Beside her stood a shorter, almost stocky, black-haired girl wearing a blue-green polo-ish shirt, long blue-green pants, and strangely tall blue-green shinguards, with a broad, flat piece of wood bearing twin serrated blades hanging at her side.

Willow didn't get a good look at the other two, who were hanging back behind their leader, before Dillon stepped forward to begin their introductions. The blue-haired girl was named Cerule Okyroe, and was, as Willow had surmised, the leader of her team, CYAN. The girl next to her was Yalassa Noon, and in the back, effectively out of sight, were Aquaria Triton and Navis Veridian.

"I promise, occurrences like this are unusual in the extreme," Dillon added, gesturing to the store. "It's not an isolated case, unfortunately, but a string of midnight Dust robberies shouldn't discourage a team of capable Huntresses from enjoying all that Vale has to offer. In fact, one of our classmates was in a store down the street when it was attacked, and from the reports she chased off the attackers on her own and left them all but empty-handed."

Cerule raised her eyebrow. "You friend must be quite talented."

"She's… certainly skilled," Willow remarked, thinking back to her first practice fight against the scythe-wielder. Ruby had improved, certainly, but she still wasn't quite in the upper rankings of the class in person-to-person combat. "Exceptionally so for her age, but we all have things we can improve on."

The conversation, under Aurora's influence, gradually turned to combat styles, and Cerule alluded that her own was built around an unusual Semblance. Dillion, inquiring, allowed a few sparks of electricity to dance between his fingers, and his counterpart lifted her hand to display a sphere of blue-white energy that swirled fluidly in midair.

"I call it Aether," the Cerule explained, sending the ball of energy toward a tumbleweed, which drifted into the air and dissolved into the sphere, which then dissipated. "It mostly lets me mimic having a telekinetic Semblance, but it has some more creative applications, too."

"I'm surprised you'd volunteer that sort of information about your abilities before the tournament begins," Aurora said, crossing her arms skeptically. Cerule laughed.

"It's not an easy Semblance to work around, even if you know what it does," she replied. "A bit like your own, Miss Two-Time Regional Champion. Besides, how likely is it that we're actually going to end up fighting each other?"

"Oh, I don't know," Dillon said, "if we're all as good as we think we are, I'd give at least eight-to-one odds that someone on each of our teams ends up fighting someone on the other."

* * *

No sooner had the team piled back into their room and collapsed than there came a hesitant double-knock at the door. Everyone exchanged glances. The knocks repeated. Dillon finally levered himself back to his feet and opened the door to find Ruby and Yang looking uncharacteristically glum.

"Uh… hello, ladies," he greeted, stepping back to allow them entry. "What seems to be the problem?"

"It's… it's Blake," Ruby said, poking her fingers together nervously. "She and Weiss had a fight Friday night, and it sort of ended with Blake… running away? We haven't seen her since."

"Weiss wants to go to the police, but we don't think that's a good idea without knowing the whole story," Yang added. "We were kind of hoping you guys could help us look for her."

Aurora pushed herself up to a sitting position, then leaned forward with her hands on her knees. "I'm a little wary of getting involved in something your teammate thinks should involve the police, especially since you seem to think that's dangerous, not just excessive. But—Blake's our friend as much as yours, so I'm at least willing to do what I can."

"Same," added Nova, fishing his Scroll out of his pocket. "I can see about tapping into the city security sys—er, I can check public records that are definitely open to anyone while we go grab breakfast. Then maybe we split into teams and see if we can find her on foot?"

Weiss' suspicious glances aside, the plan was settled and enacted accordingly. Nova tuned out the hum of the breakfast hall and his teammates and friends as he extracted computational and deception-based runtimes from his VI program and carefully worked through and around the low-level security of the Vale police surveillance network. A much larger problem than the city's token gestures in the name of cybersecurity was the fact that he didn't have the visual data to construct a facial-recognition program, so it wasn't until after breakfast that he finally scored a positive identification.

"And there she is," he announced, holding up his Scroll. "Cafe in the western end of the residential district, hanging out with a blonde monkey faunus. That was this morning, though, so I'll have to do a little more work to figure out where they've gone by now."

It took a little longer to track Blake and her new friend to the dockyards, at which point RWY set out to make amends with their missing teammate, observing apologetically that the three of them should really go alone to ensure they were able to give Blake the space she needed to tell her story, although they promised to explain everything, or at least as much as Blake was willing to tell, once they had made things right between themselves again.

Which was how, that evening, DAWN ended up gathered in RWBY's dorm as Blake took off her bow. Nova thought he saw Aurora's face quirk in a subdued smile, but his partner was more curious.

"Ok, so you're a faunus," she said. "I kind of figured that; a bow isn't as flawless a disguise as you might think. But why hide it? I'm sure it's not just so you wouldn't have to deal with Cardin."

Blake closed her eyes briefly and tilted her head downwards. When she opened them again, her expression was solemn, and she nodded several times as she answered.

"Honestly? I used to be in the White Fang."

The change in Willow's countenance was instant. Launching herself at the other girl almost faster than Nova could track her, she grabbed Blake by the collar and slammed her against the door of the room, leaned close, and hissed, "You WHAT?"

Nova shot to his feet even as his partner moved, but found himself staring impotently at the confrontation along with the six other occupants of the room. Blake stood frozen for a long moment, stammering about her childhood and change, until Willow uttered a sound of disgust, shoved her into the door, and turned away.

"Troas," Willow said, a dead anger suffusing her features, her pose, and her words. "Three years ago now. The White Fang attacked, killed everyone but me. All to get at my father's sword. We held out for nine months. We couldn't call for help because they'd destroyed the only relays close enough to give us a signal. Dad died to make sure I escaped, and I would've died anyways if Tiwaz hadn't found me. And then I spent the next three years hunting down those a—those killers, and making sure they didn't get to use Anglachel."

Now it was Weiss's turn to explode. "Anglachel?" the heiress shrieked, arms flapping like windmills. "You mean the ancient, Dust-infused sword that drives its wielders mad?"

"Yes," Willow answered patiently, some of the venom falling from her voice as she spoke. "Although it's not that bad if you get to know it. Most of the ones who went mad, in the legends, tried to use it for Grimm hunting, but that's not what it's meant for. I don't know exactly why it was made, but it's powerful and important, and a lot of people are suddenly willing to do anything to get their hands on it. Including, as I learned too late, Atlas."

Weiss simply looked confused, and Nova was briefly reminded of the spoiled girl he'd met years ago, but her expression now was honestly inquisitive, layered over a continuing concern for her teammate.

"Tiwaz," Willow explained, "my partner. He was an Atlesian Specialist. Probably still is. Probably got a commendation after what he did, maybe a promotion. We hunted down the White Fang who stole the sword, and when we finally found and defeated them, he knocked me out, stole it for himself, and I came to on a civilian airship to Vale."

"You know," Nova observed, laying a hand on his partner's shoulder, "this explains a lot about both of you. And, if it would be any use, I can try to help you find out what happened to the sword."

Willow nodded. "Thanks," she said, taking a deep breath and wrapping an arm around his hand. "I'm not sure that's a good idea right now, but I'll think about it."

Blake stepped forward from the door, hesitatingly. "Willow," she spoke up, carefully, trying not to re-anger her friend, "I left. Not as soon as I should have, and there's more I'm only just starting to do to make up for what I did, but I left. In time I saw through the justifications my own mentors gave for our violence, and I decided I wanted no part of it. I had never heard of Troas before today, but if you want my help with anything, just tell me."

"And if you ever need help burning something they've built to the ground, you know where to find me," Willow smiled at her friend, releasing Nova's arm to embrace the faunus.

"I am sorry for blowing up at you," she added. "That was uncalled for. Anything I can do, let me know."

Blake smiled in return and nodded. "Actually…"

Nova tuned out the rest of the brief discussion as RWBY filtered back to their room, distracted by the notification blinking in the corner of his Scroll: _Stage 1 recombination complete. Autodiagnostic: Stable._

* * *

A/N: Well, this is finally up. I tried to save time by combining the final two Volume 1 arcs into a single chapter, but ended up writing myself into a series of corners and sat on the ending for months because it was terrible, although I think I've mostly fixed it. Next up: possibly a summer-break interlude, definitely a food fight as soon as I figure out how to make that work three ways.


End file.
